The Impact of Government Emotion-based Response Strategies on Citizens' Satisfaction

Government responsiveness is a critical component in citizen-government interactions, shaping public trust and the effectiveness of e-governance initiatives. However, resource constraints often lead to strategic responses aimed at managing citizens’ emotions and avoiding conflicts, rather than resolving all issues. Despite this, few studies have examined government response strategies and their impact on citizen satisfaction. This study examines the impact of emotion-based responses on citizen satisfaction within the context of China’s e-governance initiatives. Utilizing data from the Chinese People’s Daily ”Message Board for Leaders” platform, we introduce the Emotion-based Responsiveness Framework in Government Communication, which quantifies government responses along four dimensions: positivity, empathy, reassurance, and personalization. We first use text analysis to identify linguistic patterns and emotional cues in government replies. Then, we apply few-shot learning via the ChatGPT API to infer dimension scores across the dataset. Lastly, we test whether government’s emotion-based responses will affect citizen’s overall satisfaction. The result shows that the emotion-based response will positively affect citizens’ satisfaction. The study contributes to e-governance literature by providing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of emotional communication strategies in digital government-citizen interactions. These insights have important implications for theory development in public administration and offer practical guidance for improving government communication strategies in the digital age, especially in situations where complete problem resolution may not be feasible.