Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Recently, the refugee crisis has been one of most complex and rapidly changing issues to practitioners and academics in the public policy around the world. South Korea was not except to this; in 2018, seven hundred thousand citizens singed an e-petition to the president to revise the refugee law against accepting 500 Yemeni refugees who entered to Jeju Island in southern part of Korea as of 2016. This study investigates the dynamics of agenda-setting process of it focusing on how the public, media, and government interplayed: who led, who followed. During the refugee crisis of 2018, we collected a daily counts of e-petitions to the president, two major newspapers’ stories (conservative and progressive), and trends of daily search volume from Google trends and Naver trends, and drew figures of issues-attention cycles of e-petition, newspapers, and internet-search activities over time. The results show that citizens’ direct e-petition activities came first, and the news media’s stories and the public’s internet search behaviors followed the lead of e-petition activities, which supports a dynamic or reverse agenda-setting theory in the online-era where citizens’ reporting on online platforms shapes the media, public and government’s attention. Additionally, using the social media analysis, the study examines how citizens initiated and shared the e-petition against refugees, and gained more than seven hundred thousand people’s signatures within only 30 days.