Achieving online governance depends on the government’s effective response to public appeals through online political engagement. The effectiveness of the government’s response has been found to be influenced by multiple factors, including the textual characteristics of those public appeals. This article explores the impact of emotional bias and the polarization of citizens’ appeal messages on the effectiveness of government responses, through natural language processing and quantitative analysis methods of 1,553,572 public appeals on China’s Government Online Message Board on the People’s Daily website. The findings show a clear and consistent mechanism impacting the effectiveness of government response: the more polarized the emotion, the longer the time and the more words required for the government to respond, resulting in lower response efficiency. These results provide new insights for understanding contemporary digital governance, citizen digital political engagement, and online political consultation, specifically around the ‘emotional communication cost’ involved in government responses.
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