Citizen Comments Research Articles

A New Approach to Assess Sustainable Corporate Reputation with Citizen Comments Using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

This study investigates the assessment of sustainable corporate reputation through citizen comments and how it can be measured by sentiment analysis methods based on machine learning and text mining. The research analyses citizen feedback on municipalities in the field of public services and examines their impact on the social reputation of the services provided by municipalities. Support vector machines, one of the machine learning methods, was used for sentiment analysis. In the study, Google Maps comments of the citizens receiving services from the municipality were used. The results of the sentiment analysis reveal that sustainable corporate reputation is directly related to citizen satisfaction and feedback. In this context, municipalities should continuously receive feedback and make strategic improvements based on citizens’ comments to ensure sustainable service quality. Municipalities are especially appreciated by citizens for their fast, effective, and high-quality services. However, some negative comments focus on issues such as the slowness of services, cleaning problems, and staff attitudes, indicating that certain improvements are needed. This feedback emphasises the need for continuous improvement in service quality.

PACKED LUNCH PHENOMENON FOR HUSBAND: NETIZENS' CONTESTATION ABOUT GENDER ROLES

Packed lunch for husbands was a viral thread on Twitter in 2020. The thread containing photos of food and the recipe went viral because of the many responses from netizens regarding packed lunch for husbands related to gender roles. This article questions how gender roles relate to packed lunch for husbands, which netizens disputed in this thread. This research uses descriptive analysis method. By collecting primary data in the form of phrases, words, sentences contained in the @rainydecember thread along with citizen comments. After the data was collected, it was analyzed using Betty Friedan's feminine mystique perspective, then described. The results showed that the owner of the thread was shackled to the mystical feminine who consciously or not helped to spread and perpetuate it by making packed lunch for her husband. The thread then received mixed responses, netizens who widely supported the thread indicated that they were constructed of a patriarchal ideology and considered the ideal woman who was good at taking care of the household as a mystical feminine. As for those who are against these threads, they have the potential to misogyny and build stereotypes on women, especially aimed at the thread owner

Spatial Validation of Agent-Based Models

This paper adapts an existing techno–social agent-based model (ABM) in order to develop a new framework for spatially validating ABMs. The ABM simulates citizen opposition to locally unwanted land uses, using historical data from an energy infrastructure siting process in Southern California. Spatial theory, as well as the model’s design, suggest that adequate validation requires multiple tests rather than relying solely on a single test-statistic. A pattern-oriented modeling approach was employed that first mapped real and simulated citizen comments across the US Census tract. The suite of spatial tests included Global Moran’s I, complemented with bivariate correlations, as well as the local indicators of spatial association (LISA) test. The global tests showed the model explained up to 65% of the variation in the historical data for US Census tract-level citizen comments on a locally unwanted land use. These global tests were also found helpful to inform the model’s calibration for the current application. The LISA results were even stronger, showing that the model predicted citizen comment clustering correctly in five of six Census tracts. It slightly over predicted comments further away from the land use. The LISA results and pattern-oriented modeling validation techniques identified theoretical factors to improve the modeling specification in future applications. The combined suite of validation techniques helped improve confidence in the model’s predictions.

Estimation of jellyfish abundance in the south-eastern Spanish coastline by using an explainable artificial intelligence model based on fuzzy logic

Jellyfish swarms have a direct negative impact on human enterprise, specially on places dependent on the sun and beach economy. The local economy and the health of bathers may be at risk from the emergence of these gelatinous organisms. Economic losses can be mitigated by monitoring the occurrence of jellyfish on the coast. Due to the lack of jellyfish data, environmental citizen science is presented as an alternative for data collection. In this study, fuzzy logic-based models have been used to modelize the knowledge from citizen comments collected by the Infomedusa app. The effect of local climatological factors such as wind speed and direction on the incidence of jellyfish on the coast was studied. The fuzzy logic-based models showed that winds perpendicular to the coast lead to a higher occurrence of jellyfish swarms in central and eastern Malaga, while winds parallel to the coast have a greater influence in the westernmost coasts. Wind speed has a different effect on jellyfish incidence depending on the study area and wind direction. Data extracted from the Infomedusa app can help to address the historical scarcity of scientific data on jellyfish. This app presents an opportunity for future studies to expand the knowledge about the occurrence of these organisms on the coasts and may contribute to the prediction of onshore arrival.

Knowing the past to write the future: risks and challenges related with social media governance in government

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify the most frequent themes related with social media governance in government by year, analyzing if these themes have evolved over time, as well as highlighting the main risks and challenges found as further research opportunities.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the authors have extracted 431 abstracts from Scopus database. Then, abstracts were grouped by year to apply topic modeling to discover the underlying topics. Specifically, the authors have applied latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm to identify the most frequent topics by year.FindingsThe results reveal 19 important topics related with social media governance in government. Then, these topics were assigned to each year to identify the evolution of the research themes over the years, proposing interesting avenues for further research based on the identification of the main risks and challenges.Practical implicationsThe proposed research methodology can be applied not only for research purposes but also to discover themes in any discourse with applications in politics, marketing, business, etc. In addition, it can be used to save time and costs analyzing citizen comments in public debates to identify the most important topics.Originality/valueThis study can serve to highlight gaps in the literature, opening the possibility that researchers can adequately position their inquiries, as well as to be aware of overstudied themes to pay less attention to them in future projects. In addition, the results of this study could serve as a starting point for other researchers to analyze connections between topics, propose theories that explain what was found and validate them in future studies.

Mapping Vicarious Proximity: Holistic and Dualistic Metaphors in a Mountain Valley Pipeline Public Hearing

ABSTRACT This article applies Justin Mando’s 2016 coding scheme for vicarious proximity to a corpus of citizen comments at a public hearing about the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile natural gas pipeline that is planned to cut across sections of West Virginia and Virginia. This analysis reveals that vicarious proximity appeals map overwhelmingly onto the public hearing comments, further establishing a theory of vicarious proximity that can be used as a way to understand how people use place-based appeals to speak about contested environmental projects. An additional finding of metaphors, categorized as holistic and dualistic, was revealed in the analysis and extends our understanding of vicarious proximity by elucidating the ideologies, value systems, and cultural influences that inform citizens’ relationship to place. Based on these findings, this article argues for future investigation of vicarious proximity to include an attention to holistic and dualistic metaphors that determine how, or if, they extend our understanding of vicarious proximity as they did in the MVP public hearing.

PUBLIC VALUE THROUGH TECHNOLOGIES DEVELOPED WITH OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA: THE LOVE SERENADE OPERATION CASE

ABSTRACT Purpose: To understand the public value that the website Operação Serenata de Amor [Love Serenade Operation], based on open government data, can generate for society. Originality/value: Researchers are investigating public value generation through digitally transformed public services, i.e., public value directly generated by the government. However, the literature needs a better understanding of this phenomenon through digital technologies, based on open public data, developed by non-governmental actors, such as the Operação Serenata de Amor website. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a qualitative approach to understand and describe the public value generated by Operação Serenata de Amor. The data were collected through citizen comments about the website’s initiatives on social media and in articles published on the internet. The data were analyzed through content analysis. Findings: The Operação Serenata de Amor generated public value by doing, facilitating, and stimulating social control. It was also identified that the site added value to society by increasing citizens’ ability to exercise social control. However, this work was limited to analyzing data collected on the internet. In future studies, researchers may collect data through interviews with citizens to understand, with more details, the public value generated by the website.

Half-length and the FACT framework: Distance-decay and citizen opposition to energy facilities

• Half-length measures the distance within which half of citizen comments occur, • The FACT siting framework ( F avorability, citizen A bility, opposition Corridors, and spatial T emplate) is defined, • The spatial template where a siting project occurs predicts the location of citizen comments, • Corridors of opposition include physical as well as information technology infrastructure,

Key characteristics influencing risk perceptions of unconventional energy development

Abstract Assessing the sustainability of energy systems must include attention to the local social and environmental impacts of such energy production, though these do not always easily align with more regional and global concerns. Social science research demonstrates that public perceptions of the social and environmental risks associated with unconventional oil and gas development (glossed by critics as “fracking”) vary both at an individual and community level. This article provides a comparative analysis of three proposed factors that influence risk perceptions: trust in government institutions, socioeconomic profile, and historical experiences with industry. We compare two Colorado communities that each had established a participatory local governance framework to minimize negative environmental impacts from oil and gas developments, but that were characterized by distinct socioeconomic profiles and industrial histories. Our quantitative analysis of citizen comments during public hearings suggests two key findings that were not predicted by the existing literature: neither trust in local government nor historical ties to heavy industry were associated with diminished risk perceptions. These findings suggest new pathways for more constructive engagement among industry, state and local government, and citizens.

Writing graffiti on the Facebook wall: Understanding the online discourse of citizens to politicians during the 2016 Spanish election

The goal of this research is to examine what form of e-expression we can find from citizens commenting on the Facebook posts of political party leaders in the context of an election. We employ quantitative content analysis, involving the coding of styles of e-expression and counting their occurrences, to determine how politician’s use Facebook, the level of citizen comments, their tone, content, and style of communication, whether comments are monologic or dialogic and the structure of dialogic interactions between citizens. The data is drawn from comments made to a sample of posts by Mariano Rajoy, incumbent Prime Minister and leader of the Popular Party, and Pablo Iglesias, leader of the new insurgent Podemos party during the 2016 Spanish general election campaign. We conceptualise citizen comments as e-expression a means for having a voice, being heard and, potentially at least, joining debates with others. The results of this research show that dynamics on Facebook pages offer an opportunity for understanding wider political dynamics in a society. It is suggested that both exogenous macro-political and endogenous micro-platform factors shape the patterns of discourse found on the social media pages of these leaders and that studying these platforms can indicate trends in wider society and how social media can accentuate attitudes towards political platforms and leaders.

Messy but Fair: The ACA's Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program and the Notice-and-Comment Process

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) promulgated a new Medicare program called the Value-Based Purchasing Program (VBPP) as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). Like many other regulatory agencies, CMS used the Notice-and-Comment process to issue proposed rules, solicit public comments, and then publish final rules. Conventional literature suggests that CMS should disproportionately favor business interests during the Notice-and-Comment process, mainly due to the business interests' greater resources and capacity to draft well-reasoned comments. However, this article argues against this presumption and contends instead that CMS listens equally well to both business interest comments and private citizen comments during the formation of the VBPP. With regard to the VBPP and the ACA, CMS appears to be resisting disproportionate sway by business interests and is instead privileging the ACA's goal of improving healthcare quality.

Do Citizens Trust Electronic Participatory Budgeting? Public Expression in Online Forums as an Evaluation Method in Belo Horizonte

This article provides a comparative study of citizen comments on the Electronic Participatory Budgeting (e‐PB) online forums in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) in 2008 and 2011. The forums allow citizens to deliberate on public projects suggested by the city hall and to vote on which ones they think should be carried out. We analyzed all messages sent to the forums (N = 2,370) in order to investigate citizen feelings toward the initiative, use of narratives and testimonies, perception of e‐PB political effectiveness and representation and whether uses changed from one edition to the next. The results indicate a significant change, from an environment of positive citizen evaluation in 2008 to a negative one in 2011, suggesting a loss of trust in the process. In 2011, participants expressed frustration over the lack of options, dissatisfaction that work promised in 2008 was not carried out, and lack of city hall responses in general. These findings demonstrate the importance of analyzing citizen perceptions and feelings when evaluating online channels and e‐participation initiatives set up by local governments, and the necessity for governments to ensure interaction and feedback, in order to sustain citizen engagement and trust.

Beyond “buy-in”: designing citizen participation in water planning as research

In United States water resources management, water quantity planning (supply, availability, and use) fall within the domain of individual states. Because water is a shared resource held in trust for the use of a state's citizenry, its management obliges the involvement of water users. Under the above regime, states have much discretion concerning how to accomplish this. In state water planning, a variety of activities are considered stakeholder engagement. Natural resource management agencies often treat public participation as a chore for attaining legitimacy whose resources might be better used for technical aspects of planning. This paper details the public participation design for the 2015 Montana State Water Plan's Yellowstone Basin scoping phase. It argues that design of participatory practices is the key variable for successful participation. Stakeholders are experts whose knowledge can be incorporated into planning to inform priorities, corroborate biophysical data, and supply insights for communicating science and policy to citizens across specific localities. We argue that stakeholder engagement in water resources planning should be treated as research for the purposes of gathering and organizing social and biophysical truths. Through participant data approaches, citizen comments as data can improve the informational basis of planning and relational aspects. Public buy-in (legitimation) is not the objective of stakeholder participation; however, it can be a by-product of good design which suits the context and effectively uses citizen input to improve decision making. Using experience from basin-scale citizen advisory committees, this essay offers recommendations for water planners to design productive public engagement practices.

Campaigning and contestation: Comments on politicians’ Facebook pages during the 2011 Danish general election campaign

This article is a critical study of the Facebook pages of politicians as public spheres using Dahlberg’s notion of contestation. A method is implemented inspired by qualitative content analysis and including focus groups in order to study citizen comments on eight main political candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2011 Danish election campaign. An analytical framework is presented that conceptualizes the particular platform as a dinner party, with a dinner table, a host, and the invited guests. The dinner party exhibits the interplay between these elements and how they limit the option of contesting the dominating discourse in favor of a supportive marketing logic.

The Internet and Citizen Participation in Rulemaking

Each year, regulatory agencies promulgate thousands of important rules through a process largely insulated from ordinary citizens. Many observers believe the Internet could help revolutionize the rulemaking process, allowing citizens to play a central role in the development of new government regulations. This paper expresses a contrary view. In it, I argue that existing efforts to apply information technology to rulemaking will not noticeably affect citizen participation, as these current efforts do little more than digitize the existing process without addressing the underlying obstacles to greater citizen participation. Although more innovative technologies may eventually enable the ordinary citizen to play a greater role in rulemaking, such future applications will only raise the question of whether greater citizen involvement is necessarily a good thing. A substantial and systematic increase in citizen comments will not be a welcome development if it leads regulators to strive to satisfy those who file comments instead of selecting the policy option that best fulfills the statutory mandate or public interest. Overall, the novelty of applying information technology to the rulemaking process merits no special optimism, but rather such technology deserves careful assessment of both its positive and negative effects.Posted paper, uploaded January 2010, is the published version of the working paper originally posted July 2003, and formerly titled The Internet and Public Participation in Rulemaking.

Techno-Social Energy Infrastructure Siting: Sustainable Energy Modeling Programming (SEMPro)

Technical, environment, social, economic and political constraints are critical barriers to the development of new renewable energy supplies. SEMPro is an agent-based, predictive analytics model of energy siting policy in the techno-social space that simulates how competing interests shape siting outcomes to identify beneficial policy for sustainable energy infrastructure. Using a high voltage transmission line as a case study, we integrate project engineering and institutional factors with GIS data on land use attributes and US Census residential demographics. We focus on modeling citizen attitudinal, Community Based Organization (CBO) emergence and behavioral diffusion of support and opposition with Bilateral Shapley Values from cooperative game theory. We also simulate the competitive policy process and interaction between citizens, CBOs and regulatory, utility and governmental stakeholders using non-cooperative game theory. We find CBO formation, utility message and NGO messaging have a positive impact on citizen comments submitted as a part of the Environmental Impact Statement process, while project need and procedure have a negative impact. As citizens communicate and exchange political opinions across greater distances with more neighbors, less CBOs form but those that do are more effective, increasing the number of messages citizens send.

Participation in E-Rulemaking: Interest Groups and the Standard-Setting Process for Hazardous Air Pollutants

ABSTRACT The advent of e-rulemaking raised concerns that regulatory agencies could become deluged if interest groups mobilized supporters to submit a high volume of comments electronically. This study examines the sources of comments on 56 proposed rules by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the decade that the agency began to solicit comments through electronic dockets. The analysis finds that comments submitted by regulated industries greatly outnumber those from other individuals and groups before and after e-commenting became common. E-rulemaking was associated with an increase in the volume of public comments overall, and the proportion of private citizen comments increased. With few exceptions, industry continued to provide the majority of comments. Mass comment campaigns by interest groups were evident in only three of the cases.

From Culture War to Difficult Dialogue: Exploring Distinct Frames for Citizen Exchange about Social Problems

While the precise nature of socio-cultural conflict in the United States remains contested, there is growing scholarly agreement that elite (media/governmental) framings may be significantly aggravating public animosities. In order to better understand how actual citizens frame meaningful issues in such an atmosphere, we collaborated as socially liberal and conservative-leaning researchers in a joint study of twenty citizens across the political spectrum, from a conservative pastor and a traditional family advocate to a socialist activist and a leader of a feminist organization. This paper reports our analysis of citizen comments on fundamental problems facing society and their proposed solutions. Themes are organized within three general categories: 1) Talking about citizen exchange: What is the essence of “good” public discourse? 2) Defining social problems: What is the nature of fundamental challenges facing society? and 3) Delimiting solutions: What is the scope of needed social change? Within each category, patterns across citizen comments are identified and explored in light of prevailing stereotypes about “liberals” and “conservatives.” Based on this examination, possible shifts in the framing of liberal-conservative exchange are proposed as a potential contribution to a more nuanced and productive public deliberation across the partisan divide.