Social Media, Collective Action and Public Policy

Abstract

Citizens use social media to inform themselves about policy issues and government actions, as well as to express political opinions, mobilize support from others or try to have their needs and preferences heard by policy-makers (e.g., Coleman and Blumler 2009). In view of that, the potential impact of social media in the fields of public policy and collective action has been in the spotlight. In the present chapter I will show how social media analysis can be useful in the study of public policy as well as in investigating the role of online and offline forms of collective action. Furthermore, I will also illustrate how social media analytical tools can profitably be used by scholars, policy analysts and practitioners. For this purpose, the relationship between online sentiment, offline protests and public policies will be deeply analyzed by focusing on three case studies related to some of the main policies enacted by the Renzi cabinet in 2014 and 2015 (Ceron and Negri 2015, 2016). In detail, these three applications of the SASA technique are related to the labor market reform, better known as the " Jobs Act " (2014), the " €80 tax bonus " (2014) and the school reform labelled " #labuonascuola " (2015). Focusing on Italy to study citizens' online reactions to public policy is particularly intriguing in light of the growing interest that Italian govern-ments now show in gauging public opinion and engaging with citizens online. Very recently, despite the scarce digital resources at its disposal and the limited digital culture of the Italian public administration, the Italian government has made several attempts to involve citizens in the © The Author(s) 2017 A. Ceron, Social Media and Political Accountability, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52627-0_7 133 " co-production " of public policies and to collect their judgments on the performance of bureaucratic offices and services. Concerning the co-production of public policies, in recent years the governments led by Monti, Letta and Renzi attempted to collect citizens' suggestions on several topics. Monti asked citizens to express their views on the digital agenda, the spending review and the legal value of academic certificates; the Letta cabinet promoted a consultation on institutional reform, while Renzi did so for the school reform. These online consulta-tions have mainly been made through closed questionnaires that only allow limited (and solicited) opinions to be expressed. The consultation on the spending review was the only one made through questionnaires with " open answers. " However, it ended in failure because the govern-ment analyzed them manually; as a consequence, it was not able to read all the 130,000 comments received and only managed to examine 80,000 of them, generating frustration among citizens. Concerning the will to monitor citizens' complaints and satisfaction with the performance of bureaucratic offices and services, in 2010 the Minister of Innovation and Public Administration Renato Brunetta launched, with little success, a social network dedicated to public administration with the aim of allowing citizens to interact with offices and evaluate their conduct. 1 Articles 54 and 63 of the Italian Digital Administration Code (CAD), as amended by the Legislative Decree no. 235 of 30 December 2010, raised the same point, claiming that " the public administration has to adopt appropriate tools to detect real-time and affordable judgments formulated by citizens. " 2