Government Interactions with Citizens on YouTube to Solve Government Transparency Problems

This article investigates how government interacts with citizens on social media channels in solving government transparency deficit problems. In Indonesia, Jakarta’s newly elected government adopted government’s official YouTube channel to address the long-standing government bureaucracy and corruption. Using content analysis, 495 YouTube videos are examined whether or not governmentgenerated YouTube videos dominantly communicate reform-oriented government transparency. The findings indicate that the government swiftly adopted YouTube for strategic leverage; advancing institutional reform within government, communicating government transparency to net-savvy citizens, and hence encouraging them to socially and politically interact on government’s official YouTube channel. Logistic regression analysis was then applied to further explain YouTube-enabled government transparency. While the YouTube content sharing platform enables the visualization of otherwise complex and murky institutional reform process, the logit model indicates the importance of dynamic capabilities of government leadership and citizen-centric e-governance as the determinants of YouTube-enabled government transparency. We propose a theoretical framework for examining the dynamic interplay between citizen-centric e-governance and external political efficacy in harnessing the potential socio-political power of social media to optimize social media-enabled government transparency.