Mining a government affairs microblog network on Sina Weibo with social network analysis

During the past four years, the government affairs microblogs in China have developed rapidly from simple outlets for disclosing information to become more efficient and effective integrated platforms for not only the communication between the government and the public, but the public´s supervision of government services. In such a circumstance, to understand the structural characteristics of a certain government affairs microblog network which is formed by the follow relationships among microblog users, become more and more important, because it can provide the bloggers with many inspirations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the information dissemination. In this paper, we demonstrate the mining of the structural characteristics of a government affairs microblog network on Sina Weibo referring to a certain government affair topic, i.e. “Participatory Budgeting”, from perspectives of three levels with the social network analysis. On the first level, we give a visual analysis on the profile of the government affairs microblog network. On the second level, we reveal the whole network´s structural characteristics with five features, i.e. density, clustering coefficient, geodesic distance, cliques and the small world effect. On the third level, we analyze the powerful individual microbloggers with four structural characteristics, including degree, betweenness, closeness and core/periphery, and classify these powerful microbloggers with the help of illustrating their identities in the real world. At last, the application of such kind of analysis on the government affairs microblog network is discussed.