Measuring Emotion in Parliamentary Debates with Automated Textual Analysis

Abstract

An impressive breadth of interdisciplinary research suggests that emotions have an influence on human behavior. Nonetheless, we still know very little about the emotional states of those actors whose daily decisions have a lasting impact on our societies: politicians in parliament. We address this question by making use of methods of natural language processing and a digitized corpus of text data spanning a century of parliamentary debates in the United Kingdom. We use this approach to examine changes in aggregate levels of emotional polarity in the British parliament, and to test a hypothesis about the emotional response of politicians to economic recessions. Our findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the mood of politicians has become more positive during the past decades, and that variations in emotional polarity can be predicted by the state of the national economy.

It Is Not Only What You Say, It Is Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

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More than Bags of Words: Sentiment Analysis with Word Embeddings

“…Case study: a validation of the procedure with patterns of negativity in Austrian parliamentary speeches Sentiment analysis has increasingly turned to parliamentary debates as substantively interesting objects of study (e.g., Rheault, Beelen, Cochrane, & Hirst, 2016;Slapin & Proksch, 2014). A key component of what political opposition parties and their members do in parliaments of democratic systems is criticizing the government parties' policy ideas and the government ministers' work.…”

Investigating Political Herd Mentality: A Community Sentiment Based Approach

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