Understanding how the expression of online citizen petitions influences the government responses in China: An empirical study with automatic text analytics

Xiaodong Feng, Chaorui Wang, Juan Wang

Abstract: Highlights•We investigate how the expression of online petitions affects government responses.•The model is tested on a dataset of an online petition platform from Sichuan, China.•Text analysis techniques are applied to extract the textual characteristics of petitions.•Negative sentiments, public interests, and detailed content will retard the response.•Governments tend to provide longer response text to these tricky petitions.