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What Can Discourse Do: Emotional Intensity of Public Messages, Readability of Government Responses and Public Satisfaction--A Multilevel Empirical Study in the Perspective of Discourse Institutionalism
ABSTRACT
Background:
The evolution of government governance models reflects a significant shift from emphasis on accountability and service delivery toward the development of a responsive governance paradigm, within which the role of governmental discursive practices has gained substantial importance.
Objective:
This study aims to elucidate the functional mechanisms of discourse within government governance. It collected textual data from the 2016-2021 People's Daily Online Local Government Leaders' Message Board, specifically analyzing 48,791 texts related to healthcare, a theme closely connected to people's livelihood and well-being.
Methods:
Guided by the theoretical perspective of discursive institutionalism, this study employed psycholinguistic software LIWC for metrics, the Chinese text readability measurement tool AlphaReadabilityChinese, and the K-means clustering algorithm to measure public message sentiment intensity, government response readability, and public satisfaction, respectively. Subsequently, it utilized Ordinary Least Squares regression and Hierarchical Linear Modeling to analyze the influencing factors of public satisfaction and their multi-level effects.
Results:
The findings reveal that the sentiment intensity of public messages and the readability of government responses have a significant positive effect on public satisfaction with government responses. Conversely, the level of equalization in basic medical and health services exerts a significant negative cross-level effect on public satisfaction with government responses.
Conclusions:
Therefore, in responding to public online appeals, the government should focus on empathizing with the public and enhance the readability of its response information, thereby improving public satisfaction with government responses and fully leveraging the important role of discourse in government governance. Furthermore, efforts to enhance the level of equalization in basic medical and health services should also consider other factors such as efficiency.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.