2021 Volume 76 Issue 5 Pages I_267-I_279
Among the developed countries, only Japan tends not to expand its public works expenditures. This can be attributed to the influence of negative public opinion on public works. The purpose of this study is to understand people’s attitudes toward public works in Japan and the United States. This paper focuses on social networking services (SNS) that allow individuals to transmit information freely, and among them, we target Twitter, which has many users in both Japan and the United States. We analyzed tweets related to public works and infrastructure for about a year from early July 2018. In order to understand what people are resonating with, we focused not only on the number of tweets, but also on the number of likes. As a result, Japan’s interest in public works and infrastructure development is heightened by disasters, fraud, and budgeting. On the other hand, there has been little sudden interest in the United States. In the US, there was no criticism such as civil engineering bashing in Japan.
