Long Tail Phenomenon in Public Policy: Analyzing Big Data on Citizen Opinion

Abstract

The research investigates the internet's long Tail phenomenon by analyzing data collected from two channels, phone and internet base citizen participation in Namyangju city in Korea. The emergence of the Internet requires a new policy system that is appropriate for the network policy process environment, and this change can be better explained from the theoretical point of view of the long tail pattern. The theory replaces the traditional Pareto Principle known as the 80/20 rule to describe the concentration of phone based citizen participation. Internet based technology in particular increase the variety of civil participations, thereby creating a longer tail in the distribution of the participation. We provide empirical evidence that the internet base citizen participation exhibits a significantly less concentrated citizen participation distribution when compared with phone base channel.