The Diffusion of Government Microblogging

Abstract

Governments across many countries are adopting new social media (e.g. twitter), and police departments are engaging in the bandwagon too. We empirically examine the spread of police microblogging in Chinese municipal police departments from the perspective of organizational innovation diffusion. The results show that government size, internet penetration rate, regional diffusion effects and upper-tier pressure are positively and significantly associated with the adoption and earliness of police microblogging, whereas fiscal revenue, economic development and openness, E-government and public safety have no significant effects. We also find that police microblogging diffusion is contingent on different variables at different phases.

Key words:

• Microblogging/twitter
• innovation diffusion
• E-government
• police department
• China

Acknowledgements

This article is based on Chapter Four of my doctoral dissertation, and I wish to thank my supervisor Professor Jiannan Wu and the dissertation committee members. Prior versions of the paper have been presented at the research seminars at Xi'an Jiaotong University, the Doctoral Interdisciplinary Innovation Symposium on Internet Opinion and Social Security, and the International Conference on Information Systems and Management in Asia Pacific, and I would like to thank conference coordinators and participants. I am also grateful to Thomas Heverin, Andrew Podger, Xuedong Yang, two anonymous reviewers and the Editor of Public Management Review, who gave informative comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the paper. The financial support from the NSFC (grant No. 71173167; 71103140) is also acknowledged.

Notes

1 Popular foreign social media applications like Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China and domestic Internet sites launch microblogs instead to allow their users to issue opinions and comments not more than 140 Chinese characters (Reuters, 2011).

2 ‘Ping'an’ means peace or safety in Chinese, and the police microblog uses this phrase to imply its mission of protecting the safety of citizens. Most police microblogs opened later usually follow the naming of ‘Ping'an’.

3 Although there are many microblog platforms in China, weibo.com is the biggest platform and can be regarded as the China version of Facebook or Twitter. It has more than 140 million users registered, accounting for the majority of microbloggers in China (Kan, 2011). Most governments and police departments in China also launch their microblog at weibo.com because of its large-scale users and extensive influences. Both domestic Internet monitoring institutions and the MPS mainly depend on weibo.com to collect their data about government or police microblogs (Xinhua, 2011; Zhang and Jia, 2011). Thus, our analysis of this platform can represent the primary sample of police microblogs in China.

4 The standard socioeconomic trichotomy of China divides it into eastern, central and western regions. The eastern eleven provinces, including Beijing, Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Hebei, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shandong, Shanghai, Tianjin and Zhejiang are commonly regarded as developed regions, whereas the twelve western provinces, including Chongqing, Gansu, Guangxi, Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan are relatively less developed. The remaining eight provinces, including Anhui, Heilongjiang, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Jilin and Shanxi are geographically and socio-economically between the above regions.

5 We also run ordinary least square (OLS) regressions to test whether they are different from the estimations of Tobit regression, and we find the results are substantially similar.