Exploring The Formation Of Netizens’ Tendentious Policy Attitude In China Based On Grounded Theory

Accompanied by the popularity of the Internet in China, public express their viewsand attitudes on public policy inclusingly through the network during the period of socialtransition. Moreover, the netizens’ policy attitudes have contributed to some importantchanges on the public policy agenda and policy-making of the top government officials inChina. However, there is not yet in-depth study on the subject, not only the Chinesegovernment but also domestic scholars. Therefore, exploring the formation of netizens’policy attitude in China is very important and urgent.Grounded theory methodological principle is applied to this exploratory topic.Grounded theory is one of the core research methods in qualitative research. Groundedtheory mainly focuses on analyzing and interpreting the meanings of the research subjectin order to develop new theories. The process of the research such as data collection andcoding is based on grounded theory.This paper first defines the related concepts of the policy attitudes of netizens. Then,collects and filters out37cases of a representative online public policy issues and theonline comments from the past three years (June2009to January2012).The researchbuilds the “Identification Model of Netizens’ Policy Reviews Focus” from the sixdimensions such as the amount of original comments, the amount of cascading comments,the amount of blogs and microblogs, news reproduction, online media distribution, thetime span of discussion of a specific policy issue. It is found that the focus areas ofnetizens’ policy comments are the people’s livelihood, real estate, civil service and anti-corruption, legal system, national income, democracy, welfare and social stability.“Tendentious policy attitude” is put forward with further analysis based on cognitivepsychology, because netizens generally tend to form a similar consistency of policiescognition, policies emotion and policy criticism. That is to say, there are policy-cognitiveinertia, policy-emotion saturation and criticism of reality.“Group pressure”,“social field” and “media induce” constitute the main elements ofmotivation sets of the preference of netizens’policy attitude.“Noise effect” and “hypnoticeffect” come from group pressure. The force of social field is embodied as a “policy- precipitation”. The media generated “issues effect” and “title effect”. Then, the paper buildthe theoretical framework of the formation of netizens’ tendentious policy attitude,including four kinds motivation, three action links and related theoretical assumptions.In view of the findings, the paper puts forward a series of implications. Decision-makers should pay more attention to the livelihood of people. They should speed up thepromulgation of compensatory social policies. The other strategies includes innovationpolicy interaction mechanism of the Government and the Internet users, improving policyquality, to rebuild the credibility of the Government and reconstruct the social sense ofresponsibility of the media. Meanwhile, proposes future research thinking from researchmethods and perspectives.