Communicating and Constructing Risk: Government and Public Interactions in Responding to Heat Risks

ABSTRACT Extreme heat is an increasingly important public‐health and governance challenge, yet less is known about how public and governmental communication construct heat risk differently and how these communication processes evolve over time. Drawing on Hilgartner's taxonomy, this study compares 49,633 public‐initiated messages from the Message Board for Leaders and 3,475 posts from official governmental Weibo accounts in China. Combining topic modeling, LIWC‐based text analysis, and econometric models, we examine how heat risk is constructed in public and governmental texts, how heat‐related communication varies across cities and over time, and how textual features and risk‐construction intensity are associated with platform‐observable communication outcomes. The findings show that public messages are more problem‐solving and demand‐oriented, whereas government posts are more prevention‐ and guidance‐oriented. Public and governmental communication exhibit asymmetry in both the prevalence of textual features and their associations with governmental responsiveness and public engagement. At the city‐year level, risk construction and communication effectiveness exhibit short‐run inconsistency but adjust toward a long‐run equilibrium relationship, suggesting that heat‐risk communication is an adaptive process shaped through repeated public‐government platform interactions.