A sentiment analysis of U.S. local government tweets: The connection between tone and citizen involvement
Introduction
Scholars and practitioners agree that providing citizens with the opportunity to participate in governance practices can increase the legitimacy of the administrative state (Arnstein, 1969, King et al., 1998, Stout, 2013, Waldo, 2007) while encouraging administrators themselves to adopt a democratic-minded ethos that appreciates citizen participation despite inherent challenges (Irvin and Stansbury, 2004, Rawlings and Catlaw, 2011). Responsive governance embodies processes, politics, and partnerships that subsequently enhance administrative decision-making through transparency and citizen engagement. In contemporary times, information communication technologies (ICTs) – especially social media – are means through which administrators can increase citizens' access to government agencies and programs (Mergel, 2013a, Mergel, 2013b).
Originally, static, one-way websites were platforms where people could engage in transactional relationships with governments, such as paying bills or filing forms (West, 2004). These one-way uses often are grouped together under the Web 1.0 moniker (Bryer & Zavattaro, 2011). More recently, however, social media technologies have emerged as key means through which government agencies at all levels are opening the doors of government, at least metaphorically, 24 h a day, seven days a week (Bryer and Zavattaro, 2011, Mergel, 2013a). Social media come in myriad forms but have in common capabilities such as instant information gathering and sharing, potential for networking, knowledge co-creation, and interactivity (Bryer and Zavattaro, 2011, Mergel, 2013a, Mergel, 2013b). As a result of these innovations, the opportunity exists to engage a significant number of individuals with varying interests in governmental affairs. Early government adopters, however, might not be taking full advantage of these interactional capabilities and thus are only increasing capacity for participation rather than meaningful citizen participation and engagement (Brainard and Derrick-Mills, 2011, Brainard and McNutt, 2010, Bryer, 2013, Hand and Ching, 2011, Mergel, 2013a, Rishel, 2011, Zavattaro and Sementelli, 2014).
As social media tools grow in popularity, it becomes important to understand how they can encourage meaningful citizen interaction (Brenner and Smith, 2013, Lutz et al., 2014). This research builds upon the emerging literature that examines social media use at the local government level (Hand and Ching, 2011, Mossberger et al., 2013, Oliveira and Welch, 2013) by incorporating a construct within technology use: sentiment analysis (Dardenne et al., 2011, Steiglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013). The purpose of this analysis is to determine how sentiment of local government social media posts influences citizen involvement on Twitter. To do this, Mergel's (2013b) framework for social media evaluation is coupled with machine-learning sentiment analysis.
In line with extant literature (Brainard and McNutt, 2010, Mergel, 2013a, Mergel, 2013b), our results indicate that government agencies are adopting an overall neutral, informative tone via social media. We also found, however, that agencies that adopt a positive tone – and undertake activities such as retweeting information from other local agencies, responding directly to citizens on Twitter, sharing photos, and using exclamation points – are more likely to encourage citizen participation on Twitter than cities that simply share information in a push manner. In other words, simply using happy words or exclamation points are not enough in and of themselves to create citizen participation; a mix is necessary. Our findings show that administrators are not using the platforms to their full dialogic capabilities and are stopping short of creating what Bryer (2013) calls the empowered citizen, whereby administrators and citizens have equal chances to contribute ideas via social media. Put simply, government use of social media still has progress to make when it comes to creating meaningful collaboration, but our findings can show at least how to create environments for participation, which can bring us closer to collaboration.
Section snippets
Social media in public administration
Public administrators necessarily concern themselves with fostering meaningful and effective citizen participation and engagement (Arnstein, 1969, King et al., 1998, McGuire, 2006, Yang, 2005). Citizen participation is understood as citizen involvement with the administrative apparatus of government (Yang & Pandey, 2011), while engagement aligns with King et al.'s (1998) authentic participation, whereby there is “continuous involvement in administrative processes with the potential for all
Machine-learning sentiment analysis
As noted in the Introduction section, the purpose of this research is to see how, if at all, sentiment influences citizen–government involvement on social media platforms at the local government level. To do this, we couple Mergel's (2013b) framework of social media transparency, participation, and collaboration with machine-learning sentiment analysis. This section will briefly detail sentiment analysis, while Section 4 highlights Mergel's framework as a means to address the research question
Mergel's framework of social media interaction
The final building block for this study is Mergel's framework for social media interaction (Mergel, 2013b). Mergel developed the framework based upon interviews with social media directors at the U.S. federal government level, and the logic is applied herein to municipal government use of social media. We hand-coded city Twitter feeds to determine what social media style was used, then this hand coding was coupled with the machine-learning sentiment analysis to reveal the findings presented
Methods
Results of this study come from analyzing tweets to and from U.S. local government agencies. To generate a database of cities, a systematic random sample was conducted utilizing the International City/County Management Association Municipal Yearbook 2012. Starting with a random number, every 25th city was counted until the database total reached 750. Cities are from each of the U.S. Census Bureau's geographic regions to ensure representation from a broad variety of municipalities in the sample.
Findings
Proposition 1 Government social media managers will likely adopt a push strategy to share information in a one-way manner.
This first proposition aimed to examine the overall strategies public administrators were using on Twitter. Our findings confirm this proposition. To code for this, Mergel's (2013b) framework was used as detailed above. When examining the Twitter pages of all 125 cities in the database, the researchers looked for characteristics such as color scheme, language used, retweets, photos,
Discussion and conclusion
The trend toward transparency and push styles of social media use seems to be preventing government agencies from fully taking advantage of social media's tremendous interactive abilities. In this research, we were curious to understand how tone influences citizen participation on social media. While we found that an overall positive tone does more to encourage participation than a neutral or negative tone, this was not always a perfect relationship, meaning that citizen sentiment scores were
Acknowledgments
Special thanks is given to the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University for their cooperation and input into this research. We also thank Dr. Ines Mergel for her insightful, helpful feedback. Finally, we thank the referees for their suggestions that have improved this manuscript.
Dr. Staci M. Zavattaro is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida. Her book, Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms, was released by SUNY Press in 2013. Her work appears in journals including Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Journal of Place Management and Development, Administrative Theory & Praxis, and Administration & Society. Her research interests include administrative theory, place marketing, and
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Dr. Staci M. Zavattaro is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida. Her book, Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms, was released by SUNY Press in 2013. Her work appears in journals including Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Journal of Place Management and Development, Administrative Theory & Praxis, and Administration & Society. Her research interests include administrative theory, place marketing, and organizational communication. Palgrave Macmillan published her book regarding cities through phases of the image in 2014.
Dr. P. Edward French is a Professor of Public Administration at Mississippi State University and serves as a Director of the Stennis Institute of Government. He also currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Public Personnel Management. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Mississippi State University, a Master's degree in Education from The University of Virginia, a Master's degree in City Management from East Tennessee State University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from The University of Tennessee.
Dr. Somya D. Mohanty received his Master's degree in Computer Science from Florida State University and his doctorate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Mississippi State University. His doctoral research focuses on designing security kernels for distributed applications. Somya is currently working as a Data Scientist/Systems Architect on the Social Media Tracking and Analysis System (SMTAS) project with the Innovative Data Laboratory at the Social Science Research Center. He designs system architectures capable of handling Big Data and develops algorithms to gain insights from the data in real-time. He also contributes to the server architecture design with the use of dynamic scalable components capable of handling large data influx (Big Data). The work involved in SMTAS also includes researching current advances in social media and data mining technologies. Somya's other research interests include information/network security, cryptographic protocols, content analysis, machine learning and distributed storage architectures.