Is social media really that effective for communicating budget policies to citizens? – a case study of the Singapore budget 2018

Abstract

Although numerous studies have been done regarding the use of social media as a policy communication tool by governments around the world, existing literature focuses on the supply-side by using citizen evaluation to measure the effectiveness of social media engagement. This is to examine how well governments adopt social media to communicate policy. This paper instead seeks to address the demand-side by identifying factors from the citizens themselves that may impact the effectiveness of adopting social media for policy communication. The case study used to examine these factors is the Singapore Budget 2018. Social media effectiveness is measured across two dimensions; (1) the change in level of awareness, as well as the (2) change in attitudes towards Singapore’s budget policy after the Budget 2018 Speech had been released. Citizen feedback is collected using an online public survey, of which demographical factors such as age, educational qualifications and employment status were cross-tabulated and suggest that social media avenues such as Facebook may not be the best way to communicate budget policy to certain segments of the population. Moreover, there is a risk of investing too much focus on social media, such that other segments of the population may be neglected. Policy recommendations are suggested to caution against and suggest ways to address this.