Understanding Relation between Public Sentiments and Government Policy Reforms

Abstract

Government of any democratic country usually needs to take decisions for the welfare of its citizens and sometimes for political gain. So, whenever government implements any major policy reforms, government collects feedback from citizens of country through surveys. For these surveys data is gathered through different agencies and from the data available on social network sites. Now a days Twitter has become the major source of open data, as it is the platform where people share their views. In this paper tweets posted by people on recently introduced policy by government of India on ‘Demonetization’ are extracted at regular intervals. Especially, whenever any policy change is implemented by government, tweets from the date of reform till the date of next reform is considered for the study. The extracted tweets are analyzed and change in sentiments of citizens related to reform is measured. Data is collected using Twitter API (Application Program Interface) in Python and sentiment analysis is performed using R Programming. Correlation between policy reform related to demonetization and public sentiments are found and the type of correlation is determined.