Mining a government affairs microblog network with SNA for improving e-Government in participatory budgeting management

Today e-Government is indispensible to the public administration and microblogs are often used as a part of e-Government especially when the public administration needs wide-ranging citizens´ participations. The participatory budgeting management in which citizens are given rights to decide how much money will be spent on the public budgeting projects is such kind of public administration. How to make full use of the government affair microblogs in the participatory budgeting management is the serious problem that the local governments in China are facing with. In this paper, we demonstrate the mining of a government affairs microblog network involved in the participatory budgeting management from Sina Weibo, the largest microblog platform in China, with Social Network Analysis, in order to put forward clues for improving the application of the government affair microblogs in e-Government implement of the participatory budgeting management. We dissect the network from two layers. On the first layer, we reveal the structural characteristics of the whole government affairs network with four features, including density, clustering coefficient, geodesic distance, and cliques. On the second layer, we first analyze the structural characteristics of the individual microblogs with four features, including degree, closeness, betweenness, and core & periphery, and then illustrate the powerful microbloggers with the help of revealing their identities in the real world.