Candidates rather than context shape campaign sentiment in French Presidential Elections (1965–2017)

Abstract

The manuscript explores whether and how the strategic context of elections and candidate attributes affect campaign sentiment. Studying five decades of French presidential elections, it provides the first longitudinal test of campaign tone outside the USA. Thereby, the paper examines concerns of an increase in negativity due to changes in electoral competition. It takes leverage from the electoral system, to study whether the strategic environment of elections (first vs. second rounds of elections) or candidate characteristics (ideology and outsider status) determine the use of positive and negative tone. To this end, the paper applies sentiment analysis to personal manifestos (professions de foi) issued by all candidates running in presidential elections (1965–2017) and validates the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary for longitudinal studies of campaign tone. Results reject worries about an increase in negativity in French elections over time. Moreover, while context matters to some extent, candidate attributes are by far more important for explaining campaign sentiment in presidential races. The findings contribute to research on the role of sentiment in electoral competition and tackle broader issues related to the impact of positive and negative political communication for elections and democracies.

Decoding Emotion Dynamics in Videos using Dynamic Exploratory Graph Analysis and Zero-Shot Image Classification: A Simulation and Tutorial using the transforEmotion R package

“…Sentiment expresses the opinion of the politician in relation to the topic of their speech or public address (Dorle & Pise, 2018). The use of positive and negative language and emotional expressions has been shown to be a tool at the disposal of politicians, and they have been shown to exhibit a strategic use of sentiment (Haselmayer, 2021). This effect is highly prominent in the use of campaign messages to frame the state of the world in either a positive or negative light (Crabtree et al, 2020;Kosmidis, Hobolt, Molloy, & Whitefield, 2019).…”

Exploring Customer Review of Local Agriculture Product Acceptance in Malaysia: A Concept Paper on Sentiment Mining

“…[17] researched on food preference, [18] examined star rating on restaurants, [13] studied incentive hierarchies affect user behaviour, [19] compared China and USA tourist satisfaction in a restaurant, and many studies are being conducted to improve algorithm accuracy [20]- [25]. Other than English, most research has been conducted in Arabic [26]- [29]; French language [30]- [32]; Chinese language [33]- [35] and Italian [36]- [38]. On the contrary, in Malay language there are not much research especially in processing a text mixture English and Malay language simultaneously.…”