Social media and policy making: the influence of netizens on Chinese government policies during the COVID 19 pandemic.

This paper analyses the role of the public’s opinions expressed on social media (Weibo in particular) in influencing the Chinese government’s policies to combat Covid-19. Specifically, we answer the following research questions: to what extent was the Chinese government responsive to netizens’ opinions (overall salience/tone/specific focus and proposed solutions) in its policy reactions to the pandemic? For which types of issues was the government more likely to respond to changes in netizens’ level of attention and opinions? Which other variables (relating to the issue as well as the reactions in Weibo) help to explain the government reaction or inaction to changes in netizens’ attention and opinions? A number of previous studies have examined the role of netizens in Chinese politics, but few studies have focused on understanding how opinions expressed on social media might affect policy decisions. And of these studies, most have exclusively examined single case involving events that were selected precisely due to their very high salience in social media – such as scandals and natural disasters. This lack of research on social media influence over policy is marked in authoritarian systems generally, not only for China. Indeed, even for democratic countries, we still know surprisingly little about when and how governments (i.e. under which particular circumstances) respond to changes in opinion in social media and even less about how this might relate to substantive policy changes. To answer our questions, we use a mix of computational and manual content analysis drawing on a dataset of over 35 million COVID-19 related Weibo posts between 19th of January and 23rd of April 2020 (see Hu et al 2020). Our research design is unique in integrating this data with a novel hand-coded dataset of all policy and quasi-policy decisions made by the Chinese government during the same period. We then combine macro-analysis with in-depth case studies. The context of the pandemic crisis means that the whole policy process (i.e. agenda-setting, formulation and implementation) took place at unprecedented speed. This, combined with our research design, enables us to analyse when and how opinions in Weibo relate to policy change as well as examining the possibility of reciprocal influence, i.e. from the opinions expressed in Weibo to change in government policy as well as how netizens reacted to the government’s policy, which in turn might have influenced implementation or lead to new policy initiatives, as hypothesised by Wolfsfeld’ s Politics Media Politics model (PMP). The analysis will help us understand the degree and nature of the influence of the public, via social media, on policy change in crisis situations in an authoritarian political system. This paper will thus contribute to the literature on authoritarian government responsiveness in the digital era as well as to our understanding of the mechanisms that might explain social media impact in policy change, , and hence the factors that make influence more or less likely.