A reputational perspective on structural reforms
The aim of the CLARIAH-VL Open Humanities Service Infrastructure is to advance digitally-enabled research in Humanities and the Arts by, among other disciplines, providing data-level access to digitized and born-digital resources. In this blogpost series, we will communicate on research scenarios leading to and building upon the software and datasets made available through CLARIAH-VL. In the previous blogposts in this series, the RePublic model was introduced, and it was explained how the model was used to show the interaction between parliamentary attention and media attention of public agencies. This third and final part discusses the research conducted in Boon et al. (2025), in which RePublic was utilized.
Introduction
The study described in this blogpost explores how media coverage and different sentiments in media coverage impact the likelihood of structural reforms in public agencies.
Research questions
- Does the amount of media attention influence the likelihood of structural reforms in public agencies?
- Does the tone of media coverage (positive or negative sentiment) impact the likelihood of reforms?
- Are negative reputations more influential than positive reputations in triggering reforms?
Hypotheses
- Agencies with more media attention are less likely to face structural reforms.
- Positive reputations reduce the likelihood of reforms, while negative reputations increase it.
- Negative reputations have a stronger impact on reform likelihood than positive reputations.
Methodology
The study used two main datasets to answer the research questions mentioned above. The first dataset was the same corpus that was mentioned in the previous blogpost in this series: it consists of Flemish news articles (published between 2000 and 2015) that discuss a public agency. The RePublic model was used to provide sentiment annotations (positive, negative, neutral) to these articles. The second corpus, on the other hand, consisted of a dataset extracted from the Belgian State Administration Database (Kleizen, Verhoest, and Wynen 2018), which contains information regarding the structural reforms which the same agencies that occur in the first corpus underwent.
In order to detect any effects of sentiment in media attention on structural reform likelihood, both linear and non-linear statistical models were used. The fact whether an agency experienced a structural reform in a given year (binary: yes/no) was treated as the dependent variable. The independent variables, on the other hand, were media sentiment and total media attention. Political turnover and neutral sentiment were used as control variables.
Results
The results indicate an inverted U-shaped relationship between negative media coverage and reform likelihood: negative media reputations initially increase the likelihood of reforms, but this effect diminishes when negativity becomes extreme. Agencies with consistently negative reputations are less likely to experience reforms, as negativity becomes normalized. Positive media reputations, on the other hand, do not significantly impact the likelihood of reforms.
References
Jan Boon, Jan Wynen, Koen Verhoest, Walter Daelemans, Jens Lemmens. 2025. A Reputational Perspective on Structural Reforms: How Media Reputations are Related to the Structural Reform Likelihood of Public Agencies. In Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, pp. 1-15. Oxford University Press.
Jan Boon, Jan Wynen, Walter Daelemans, Jens Lemmens, Koen Verhoest. 2023. Agencies on the Parliamentary Radar: Exploring the Relations between Media Attention and Parliamentary Attention for Public Agencies Using Machine Learning Methods. In Public Administration 102:3, pp. 1026-1044. Wiley Online Library.
Bjorn Kleizen, Koen Verhoest, and Jan Wynen. 2018. Structural Reform Histories and Perceptions of Organizational Autonomy: Do Senior Managers Perceive Less Strategic Policy Autonomy When Faced with Frequent and Intense Restructuring? Public Administration 96: pp. 349-67. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12399
Evelien Willems and Frederik Heylen. 2023. FlemPar: An interface to the API of the Flemish Parliament. https://github.com/PolscienceAntwerp/Flempar
Authors
Jens Lemmens*, Jan Boon**, Koen Verhoest*, and Walter Daelemans*
(*University of Antwerp, **University of Hasselt)