A webometric approach to policy analysis and management using exponential random graph models

Many studies have examined citizen participation in policymaking and its delivery mechanisms through social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but few have explored empirical strategies to investigate the nature of online citizen participation in the field of policy analysis and management. The webometric approach is a quantitative tool for capturing network-based intercommunication derived from the Web 2.0 sphere as user-generated content by using diverse methods in informetrics. By applying this approach to examine citizen participation on social media, this study introduces an empirical strategy for collecting data on social media tools used by governments and identifies patterns of citizens’ e-participation and relationships between citizens, governments, and various organizations involved in policymaking processes through social media. The results based on the 311 service platforms of New York City and San Francisco suggest that the webometric approach can not only extract government agencies’ communication behaviors toward others on social media but also capture the overall network structure, the pattern of interactions between participants, and network properties of participants.

[1]  G. Barnett,et al.  Longitudinal non-euclidean networks: Applying Galileo , 1985 .

[2]  I. Rubin The Politics of Public Budgeting: Getting and Spending, Borrowing and Balancing , 1990 .

[3]  Kay Lehman Schlozman,et al.  Citizen Activity: Who Participates? What Do They Say? , 1993, American Political Science Review.

[4]  J. C. Thomas Public Participation in Public Decisions: New Skills and Strategies for Public Managers , 1995 .

[5]  Peter Ingwersen,et al.  Informetric analyses on the world wide web: methodological approaches to 'webometrics' , 1997, J. Documentation.

[6]  Evan M. Berman,et al.  Dealing with Cynical Citizens , 1997 .

[7]  Morton E. O'Kelly,et al.  Hub‐and‐Spoke Networks in Air Transportation: An Analytical Review , 1999 .

[8]  Robert D. Putnam,et al.  Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community , 2000, CSCW '00.

[9]  P. Norris Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide , 2001 .

[10]  Xiaohu Wang,et al.  Assessing Public Participation in U.S. Cities , 2001 .

[11]  M. Shamsul Haque,et al.  E-Governance in India: Its Impacts on Relations Amongcitizens, Politicians and Public Servants , 2002 .

[12]  K. Callahan,et al.  The utilization and effectiveness of citizen advisory committees in the budget process of local governments , 2002 .

[13]  Mark Buchanan,et al.  Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks , 2002 .

[14]  D. Watson,et al.  Citizen surveys: a component of the budgetary process , 2003 .

[15]  Peter R. Monge,et al.  Theories of Communication Networks , 2003 .

[16]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Hyperlink Analyses of the World Wide Web: A Review , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[17]  M. Berner,et al.  The State of the States: A Review of State Requirements for Citizen Participation in the Local Government Budget Process , 2004 .

[18]  D. West E‐Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes , 2004 .

[19]  T. Snijders Models for longitudinal network datain , 2005 .

[20]  Kristen D. Landreville,et al.  Blogging and Hyperlinking: use of the Web to enhance viability during the 2004 US campaign , 2005 .

[21]  B. Roberts,et al.  Rethinking development in Latin America , 2005 .

[22]  Kaifeng Yang,et al.  ASSESSING CITIZEN INVOLVEMENT EFFORTS BY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS , 2005 .

[23]  S. Wasserman,et al.  Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis , 2005 .

[24]  Tom A. B. Snijders,et al.  Manual for SIENA version 2.1 , 2005 .

[25]  P. Pattison,et al.  New Specifications for Exponential Random Graph Models , 2006 .

[26]  C. Steglich,et al.  Applying SIENA: An illustrative analysis of the co-evolution of adolescents’ friendship networks, taste in music, and alcohol consumption , 2006 .

[27]  Peng Wang,et al.  Recent developments in exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks , 2007, Soc. Networks.

[28]  T. Snijders,et al.  Modeling the Coevolution of Networks and Behavior , 2007 .

[29]  Daniel W. Drezner,et al.  Introduction: Blogs, politics and power: a special issue of Public Choice , 2007 .

[30]  Participation, Perception of Participation, and Citizen Support , 2007 .

[31]  Jeremy Rose,et al.  The Role of Social Networking Services in eParticipation , 2009, ePart.

[32]  R. Ackland Social Network Services as Data Sources and Platforms for e-Researching Social Networks , 2009 .

[33]  Susan C. Herring,et al.  Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter , 2009 .

[34]  A. Ho,et al.  Participatory Budgeting in Midwestern States: Democratic Connection or Citizen Disconnection? , 2009 .

[35]  Helen Margetts,et al.  The Internet and Public Policy , 2009 .

[36]  Marc Holzer,et al.  An examination of the municipal 311 system , 2009 .

[37]  Henry E. Brady,et al.  The Internet and Civic Engagement , 2009 .

[38]  Ines Mergel Gov 2.0 Revisited : Social Media Strategies in the Public Sector , 2010 .

[39]  Isabell M. Welpe,et al.  Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment , 2010, ICWSM.

[40]  Soon Ae Chun,et al.  Government 2.0: Making connections between citizens, data and government , 2010, Inf. Polity.

[41]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World , 2010 .

[42]  Han Woo Park,et al.  Mapping the e-science landscape in South Korea using the webometrics method , 2010, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[43]  M. Thelwall,et al.  Policy-relevant Webometrics for individual scientific fields , 2010 .

[44]  Steven Sams,et al.  Networked Politics on Cyworld: The Text and Sentiment of Korean Political Profiles , 2011 .

[45]  A. Bruns,et al.  #Ausvotes: How twitter covered the 2010 Australian federal election , 2011 .

[46]  Helen Margetts,et al.  The Internet and Transparency , 2011 .

[47]  Youngju Kim,et al.  Citations among communication journals and other disciplines: a network analysis , 2011, Scientometrics.

[48]  Han Woo Park,et al.  e-Research applications for tracking online socio-political capital in the Asia-Pacific region , 2011 .

[49]  Han Woo Park,et al.  Government organizations’ innovative use of the Internet: The case of the Twitter activity of South Korea’s Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries , 2011, Scientometrics.

[50]  Luis F. Luna-Reyes,et al.  Understanding risks, benefits, and strategic alternatives of social media applications in the public sector , 2012, Gov. Inf. Q..

[51]  Steven Sams,et al.  AN OVERVIEW STUDY OF TWITTER IN THE UK LOCAL GOVERNMENT , 2012 .

[52]  A. Dugas,et al.  Google Flu Trends: correlation with emergency department influenza rates and crowding metrics. , 2011, Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

[53]  Edward A. Fox,et al.  Social media use by government: From the routine to the critical , 2012, Gov. Inf. Q..

[54]  Young Hoon Kwak,et al.  An Open Government Maturity Model for social media-based public engagement , 2012, Gov. Inf. Q..

[55]  John Clayton Thomas Citizen, customer, partner : engaging the public in public management , 2012 .

[56]  Theresa A. Pardo,et al.  Exploring 311-Driven Changes in City Government , 2012, AMCIS.

[57]  Han Woo Park,et al.  Can web ecology provide a clearer understanding of people’s information behavior during election campaigns? , 2013 .

[58]  Han Woo Park,et al.  Political Discourse Among Key Twitter Users: The Case Of Sejong City In South Korea , 2013 .

[59]  Theresa A. Pardo,et al.  Identifying Success Factors and Challenges of 311-Driven Service Integration: A Comparative Case Study of NYC311 and Philly311 , 2013 .

[60]  Amy J. Starmer,et al.  Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment and Prevention , 2013, Annals of Internal Medicine.

[61]  Han Woo Park,et al.  Mapping election campaigns through negative entropy: Triple and Quadruple Helix approach to South Korea’s 2012 presidential election , 2013, Scientometrics.

[62]  Kyujin Jung,et al.  Social Media Use during Japan's 2011 Earthquake: How Twitter Transforms the Locus of Crisis Communication , 2013 .

[63]  Matthew A. Shapiro,et al.  Interacting or Just Acting? -A Case Study of European, Korean, and American Politicians' Interactions with the Public on Twitter , 2013 .

[64]  David Gunnarsson Lorentzen Webometrics benefitting from web mining? An investigation of methods and applications of two research fields , 2013, Scientometrics.

[65]  Han Woo Park,et al.  E-campaigning versus the Public Official Election Act in South Korea: Causes, consequences and implications of cyber-exile , 2013, Aslib Proc..

[66]  Theresa A. Pardo,et al.  Building Understanding of Municipal Service Integration: A Comparative Case Study of NYC311 and Philly311 , 2013, 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[67]  Cécile Viboud,et al.  Reassessing Google Flu Trends Data for Detection of Seasonal and Pandemic Influenza: A Comparative Epidemiological Study at Three Geographic Scales , 2013, PLoS Comput. Biol..

[68]  H. Park,et al.  Introduction to the special issue: social media interaction between public and government in Asia-Pacific , 2014 .

[69]  H. Park,et al.  Strategies affecting Twitter-based networking pattern of South Korean politicians: social network analysis and exponential random graph model , 2014 .

[70]  Han Woo Park,et al.  The Presence of Hyperlinks on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Cyworld in Korea , 2014, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[71]  Gohar Feroz Khan,et al.  From e-government to social government: Twitter use by Korea's central government , 2014, Online Inf. Rev..

[72]  Se Jung Park,et al.  Information networks and social media use in public diplomacy: a comparative analysis of South Korea and Japan , 2014 .

[73]  Sujin Choi,et al.  An exploratory approach to a Twitter-based community centered on a political goal in South Korea: Who organized it, what they shared, and how they acted , 2014, New Media Soc..

[74]  G. Khan,et al.  Social media communication strategies of government agencies: Twitter use in Korea and the USA , 2014 .

[75]  Chung Joo Chung,et al.  SNS use by the Korean government: a case of Me2Day , 2014 .