Public opinion on megaprojects over time: findings from four megaprojects in the UK

Abstract

Megaprojects, due to their size, scale, and technical complexity are expensive and controversial, and how they proceed over time is a key topic of interest. This paper seeks to identify the issues surrounding changes in public opinion over time and discusses a larger question on whether such knowledge can be generalized across projects. An automated text analysis technique called 'sentiment analysis' has been used to plot trajectories for four UK megaprojects from newspaper articles. The empirical setting includes two military and two (civil) infrastructure projects, allowing the exploration of differences between the two fields as a secondary line of analysis.