Trapped in the process: procedural justice and emotional escalation in digital citizen-state interactions

Digital complaint systems generate large-scale traces of citizens' emotional expression, offering new opportunities for computational social psychology to examine how institutional settings shape collective appraisal patterns. Emotional intensity in these systems varies dramatically across governance domains, yet the psychological processes associated with this variation remain underexplored. Drawing on appraisal theory and procedural justice literature, we examine emotional intensity as a text-based proxy for aggregate appraisal tendencies related to procedural fairness, such as citizens' sense of control and perceived institutional responsiveness. Analyzing 76,447 submissions from a provincial digital governance platform in China, we combine BERTopic modeling with multi-dimensional sentiment analysis to map emotion-topic coupling patterns. Results show a clear gradient: domains tied to long-term welfare, such as labor rights and education, show the mildest emotional profiles, while housing disputes and consumer complaints show markedly stronger intensity. We highlight two structural patterns associated with this asymmetry. First, spatial-functional misalignment reveals a mismatch between citizens' holistic representations of localized problems and fragmented administrative processing. Second, linguistic markers in extreme-intensity submissions heavily emphasize procedural language (e.g., "rectification," "transfer") over crisis vocabulary, suggesting frustration with stalled pathways. We conceptualize this pattern as procedural entrapment: a form of emotional escalation associated with institutional fragmentation, diminished perceived control, and diffuse accountability. Beyond administrative efficiency, these findings suggest that emotional data can serve as diagnostic signals of institutional bottlenecks. The study also speaks to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) by examining how institutional design relates to perceived procedural justice and institutional legitimacy in digitally mediated citizen-state interactions.