Media usage, political interest and citizens’ issue attention to government annual report in China- evidence from 19 major cities

ABSTRACT

A Government Annual Report (GAR) plays a critical role in signalling what issues governments at various levels in China paid attention to. Based on data from a survey conducted in June 2016, we divide GAR topics into two categories: macro-economic issue and citizen livelihood issue. On average, citizens are more interested in livelihood issue than economy issue in 19 cities in China. Our empirical analysis shows that media usage and political interest can explain the variation in issue attention among different citizens. We also find that the effect of political interest on livelihood issue can be mediated by social media.

KEYWORDS:

• GAR
• issue attention
• political interest
• social media

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

1. Weibo brings change to China accessed on 3 June 2020.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18887804.

2. Wordcloud, a package developed for R statistical software, can visualize words in a picture according to their frequencies.

3. We first collected all the GARs from the years 2001 to 2017, and then prepared the data by performing word segmentation, removing punctuations, etc. We then collected the top 50 words in terms of frequency and translated them into English. Using the English words, we created the wordcloud. All other Chinese words can be found from the Appendix.

4. Cronbach’s alpha and its Internal consistency: α ≥ 0.9, Excellent; 0.9 > α ≥ 0.8, Good; 0.8 > α ≥ 0.7, Acceptable; 0.7 > α ≥ 0.6, Questionable; 0.6 > α ≥ 0.5, Poor; 0.5 > α, Unacceptable.

5. Political symbol is 3.1; News_broadcast is 2.9.

6. See the appendix to find the scores for each city. We only focused on cities in mainland China.

Additional information

Funding

This is an independent research project. No funding received for this project.

Notes on contributors

Zongfeng Sun

Zongfeng Sun is an associate professor at the School of Political Science and Public Administration in Shandong University, China. His research interests include organizational theory, public policy,  e-government, corruption and anti-corruption in China.

Jun Yang

Jun Yang is an associate professor at the School of Public Administration and Emergency Management in Jinan University, China. His research focuses on public policy analysis, performance evaluation and human resource management.