Clark, SD orcid.org/0000-0003-4090-6002 and Lomax, N (2020) Linguistic and semantic factors in government e-petitions: A comparison between the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Government Information Quarterly, 37 (4). 101523. ISSN 0740-624X
Abstract
Many legislators around the word are offering the use of web based e-petitioning platforms to allow their electorate to influence government policy and action. A popular e-petition can gain much coverage, both in traditional media and social media. The task then becomes how to understand what features may make an e-petition popular and hence, potentially influential. One area of investigation is the linguistic and topical content of the supporting e-petition text. This study takes an existing methodology previously applied to the American government's e-petition platform and replicates the study for the United Kingdom's equivalent platform. This allows an insight into not only the United Kingdom's e-petition process but also a comparison with a similar platform. We find that when assessing an e-petition's popularity, the control variables are significant in both countries, e-petitions in the United Kingdom are more popular if some named entities are used in the text, and that topics are commonly more influential in America.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Centre for Spatial Analysis & Policy (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 22 Jul 2020 15:30 |
Last Modified: | 21 Sep 2020 09:20 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.giq.2020.101523 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:163511 |