A dinâmica entre o ambiente de dialogic accounting e a legitimidade das ações governamentais no contexto das mídias sociais

Abstract

This thesis aimed to investigate the relationship between the dialogic accounting environment and the legitimacy of government actions in a social media context. Based on Legitimacy Theory and the principles of dialogic accounting, the study assumes that the combination of transparency of financial information, use of social media, and dialogic communication can promote a greater perception of legitimacy by citizens. To this end, all posts made by 49 Brazilian city halls on the social media Instagram between 2021 and 2024 were collected through automated data scraping procedures. After the collection, an automated classification was performed to identify posts with financial content. Posts that did not contain complete data for the variables used in the model were then excluded from the sample, thus, the final sample consisted of 10,023 posts classified as financial information. The dependent variable was operationalized through sentiment analysis of the comments on the posts, using the LeIA tool. The independent variables were grouped into three dimensions that constitute the dialogic accounting environment: (i) transparency of financial information (frequency, detail, readability, and appearance), (ii) engagement on social media (number of likes and comments), and (iii) dialogic communication (interactivity between the public entity and citizens). Statistical models with robust random effects panel data were used, in addition to the use of dimensionality reduction techniques by autoencoder to synthesize the components of the dialogic accounting environment into latent variables. The empirical results confirmed that transparency and dialogic communication exert positive and statistically significant effects on legitimacy. Even so, the hypothesis that the dialogic accounting environment is positively associated with the legitimacy of government actions was corroborated. Thus, the research findings show that the dialogic accounting environment contributes significantly to improving the legitimacy of government actions in the context of social media, proving the proposed thesis.