Abstract
Police departments increasingly use social media for enhancing their relationships with citizens. However, little is known about how specific characteristics of police-initiated messages affect whether and to what extent citizens engage with the former. This study looks at 11 large police departments using Twitter in Germany. Based on a multimethod approach, it explores the effect of content type and two emotional elements (i.e. arousal and valence) of tweets on different dimensions of citizen engagement. The latter is measured as observable online behavioral responses to police tweets in form of likes, comments, and retweets. The results suggest that emotional arousal (i.e. the emotional intensity of a tweet) plays a key role in triggering all forms of citizen engagement, while emotional valence (more specifically, the negativity of a tweet) largely shows no effect. Moreover, the impact of content type (informative versus interactive) varies across the different engagement dimensions.
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