Analyzing and Visualizing Government-Citizen Interactions on Twitter to Support Public Policy-making

ROCIO HUBERT; ELSA ESTEVEZ; ANA MAGUITMAN; TOMASZ JANOWSKI

Digital Government: Research and Practice

ACM

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2020 vol. 1 p. 1 - 21

Twitter is widely adopted by governments to communicate with citizens. It has become a major source of data for analyzing how governments communicate with citizens and how citizens respond to such communication, uncovering important insights about government-citizen interactions that could be used to support public policy-making. This article presents research that aims at developing a software tool called Twitter Analytics for Government Intelligence and Public Participation (TA4GIP) that applies sentiment analysis and visualization techniques to information collected from Twitter and presents the findings to policy-makers and other non-technical users to facilitate understanding and interpretation. The use of the tool is illustrated through the case study of Twitter communication carried by five government secretaries responsible for health, education, social development, labor, and environment sectors in Mexico and corresponding citizen responses over a nine-month period. The case study demonstrates that TA4GIP helps identify and analyze relevant aspects of government presence and citizen participation on social media, such as abnormal activity, salient topics being discussed, citizen views about enacted public policies, correlations between types of emotions in responses to particular government announcements, topics that generate polarized reactions from citizens, and many others.