Operational Performance Evaluation of E-government Microblogs Under Emergencies Based on a DEA Method

Microblogging has become a crucial channel for e-governments to interact with the public and has been evolving as a powerful and promising tool to address emergency management. The operational performance of an e-government microblog under emergencies plays a key role in shaping the e-government’s overall performance. This study creatively proposes a novel multi-indicator system for evaluating this operational performance in the life cycles of emergencies and applies these multiple indicators in a data envelopment analysis method to establish an evaluation model. Twenty-four e-government microblogs concentrating on the bus crash emergency in the Wanzhou district of Chongqing city are evaluated by this model. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed multi-indicator system and evaluation model are feasible and effective. This study’s findings indicate that e-governments should be encouraged to attach great importance to microblogs, pay direct attention to emergencies during their life cycles, concentrate on multi-stage evaluations to discover their performance changes across the “turning points” of emergencies, and collaborate with superior or subordinate e-governments to improve their microblogs’ operational performances.