Government-Led or Public-Led? Chinese Policy Agenda Setting during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dai, Yixin; Li, Yuejiang; Cheng, Chao-yo; Zhao, Hong; Meng, Tao

doi:10.1080/13876988.2021.1878887

Cited by 25 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(38 reference statements)

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“…First, we only investigated one social media platform, which may not represent other dynamics of social representation processes happening in other online or offline settings. Second, while we used supervised machine learning methods to categorize the topic landscape of COVID-19 discussions, we did not involve other dimensions of the data, such as sentiments, specific emotions, or metaphors, which were analyzed in prior research ( Dai et al, 2021 ; Semino, 2021 ). Future research could extend computational approaches and employ qualitative and critical analyses to delve deeper into the representations of COVID-19 on other linguistic and rhetorical dimensions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following the work of previous studies ( Barberá et al, 2019 ; Chen et al, 2019 ; Dai et al, 2021 ; Han et al, 2021 ; Han & Wang, 2015 ; Luqiu et al, 2019 ; Pan et al, 2018 ), Weibo users in our study were categorized into three groups: the general public, opinion leaders, and organizations. Opinion leaders included those verified individual influential users, who have an orange badge on their homepage.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within a social media system, these three groups often hold different motivations, structural positions, credibility, and influences in online communication ( Chen et al, 2019 ; Pan et al, 2018 ). For example, recent research shows opinion leaders and the general public have been strategically engaging with COVID-19 discussions ( Chen et al, 2020b ; Dai et al, 2021 ; Han et al, 2021 ), with opinion leaders often positioning themselves to leverage the general public's narratives to influence policy-making processes ( Han & Wang, 2015 ; Luqiu et al, 2019 ). However, detailed insights on how the three actor groups collectively represented COVID-19 were lacking.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Multiplicity and dynamics of social representations of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media from 2019 to 2020

Chen

Zhang

Liao

et al. 2022

Information Processing & Management

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Multiplicity and dynamics of social representations of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media from 2019 to 2020

Chen

Zhang

Liao

et al. 2022

Information Processing & Management

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“…Amid the mass panic in response to the first reports of the pandemic, China was able to efficiently respond to the negative public perception and positively utilize effective information from public opinion monitoring to support pandemic control efforts. The Chinese government pays attention to and is responsive to the emotions of the citizens through social media (Dai et al, 2021). This result indicated that the risk communication strategy and public opinion guidance measures of China played a positive role in regulating the emotions of the public and that the strategies such as quarantines and city lockdowns have not had unduly negative effects on the public.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Capturing the Trajectory of Psychological Status and Analyzing Online Public Reactions During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic Through Weibo Posts in China

et al. 2021

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When a major, sudden infectious disease occurs, people tend to react emotionally and display reactions such as tension, anxiety, fear, depression, and somatization symptoms. Social media played a substantial awareness role in developing countries during the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This study aimed to analyze public opinion regarding COVID-19 and to explore the trajectory of psychological status and online public reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic by examining online content from Weibo in China. This study consisted of three steps: first, Weibo posts created during the pandemic were collected and preprocessed on a large scale; second, public sentiment orientation was classified as “optimistic/pessimistic/neutral” orientation via natural language processing and manual determination procedures; and third, qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted to reveal the trajectory of public psychological status and online public reactions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public psychological status differed in different periods of the pandemic (from December 2019 to May 2020). The newly confirmed cases had an almost 1-month lagged effect on public psychological status. Among the 15 events with high impact indexes or related to government decisions, there were 10 optimism orientation > pessimism orientation (OP) events (2/3) and 5 pessimism orientation > optimism orientation (PO) events (1/3). Among the top two OP events, the high-frequency words were “race against time” and “support,” while in the top two PO events, the high-frequency words were “irrationally purchase” and “pass away.” We proposed a hypothesis that people developed negative self-perception when they received PO events, but their cognition was developed by how these external stimuli were processed and evaluated. These results offer implications for public health policymakers on understanding public psychological status from social media. This study demonstrates the benefits of promoting psychological healthcare and hygiene activity in the early period and improving risk perception for the public based on public opinion and the coping abilities of people. Health managers should focus on disseminating socially oriented strategies to improve the policy literacy of Internet users, thereby facilitating the disease prevention work for the COVID-19 pandemic and other major public events.

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“…In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have had to control the spread of the infectious disease while mitigating the pandemic's adverse impacts on the economy and citizens' livelihoods ( Benavides & Nukpezah, 2020 ; Liu et al, 2021 ; Mallinson, 2020 ; Yan et al, 2020 ). During crisis policy making, governments also have to quickly respond to public sentiment in addition to issue specific requests from individual citizens ( Dai et al, 2020 ). Political scientists coin the term of government responsiveness to denote the extent to which a government takes actions to respond to their citizens' needs and concerns ( Broockman, 2013 ; Distelhorst and Hou, 2014 , Distelhorst and Hou, 2017 ).…”

Section: Literature Review and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Government responsiveness and public acceptance of big-data technology in urban governance: Evidence from China during the COVID-19 pandemic

Guo

Chen

Liu

2022

Cities

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The COVID-19 global pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to nations and cities worldwide. Governments have adopted Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to rapidly control the spread of a novel coronavirus. As an innovative but controversial ICT-based tool, health QR code plays a vital role by assisting rapid contact tracing. Yet, whether and how citizens accept this policy tool remains an unknown theoretical and empirical question. In this paper, we study the sources that determine citizens' acceptance of health QR code in city governance. Based on a nation-wide online survey covering 28 major provincial-capital cities in China, we find that individual experiences and political identities affect citizens' acceptance of QR code. Even though public opinion regarding this issue is diverse, the government's responses to citizens' requests play a critical role in enhancing their acceptance of using QR code both in the current and future stages. Specifically, as the citizens perceive a higher level of city government responsiveness, they are less worried about privacy leaks and more likely to perceive the effectiveness of health QR code in improving public health, thus resulting in a higher acceptance. The results offer broad policy implications for smart cities and urban governance.

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Government-Led or Public-Led? Chinese Policy Agenda Setting during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cited by 25 publications

References 36 publications

Multiplicity and dynamics of social representations of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media from 2019 to 2020

Multiplicity and dynamics of social representations of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media from 2019 to 2020

Capturing the Trajectory of Psychological Status and Analyzing Online Public Reactions During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic Through Weibo Posts in China

Government responsiveness and public acceptance of big-data technology in urban governance: Evidence from China during the COVID-19 pandemic

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