Open AccessPolitical Leaders’ Communication: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis during Covid-19 Pandemic
Author(s) -
Manpreet Kaur,
Rajesh Verma,
Sandeep Ranjan
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
jurnal the messenger
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2527-2810
pISSN - 2086-1559
DOI - 10.26623/themessenger.v13i1.2585
Subject(s) - politics , political communication , pandemic , political science , the internet , public relations , covid-19 , sentiment analysis , state (computer science) , psychology , social psychology , law , computer science , medicine , world wide web , disease , pathology , algorithm , infectious disease (medical specialty) , machine learning
The pandemic made it critical for political leaders to intensify measures in fight against Covid-19 and one such measure was building trust among public through communication. With exponential growth in reach of social media, while state political leaders have progressively used internet for election campaigns, limited studies have explored as to how leaders use this medium to communicate during crisis, what kind of information do they share and what are common issues addressed. This paper, using qualitative research design, analyses Indian political leaders’ communication on Twitter. Sentiment Analysis was carried to identify and extract subjective information in leaders’ communication using 29 Indian political leaders, wherein 12,128 tweets were extracted. Subjectivity scores depicted more than half of leaders had shared fact-based information, and Polarity scores indicated that almost 90% of leaders shared positive or neutral information thus leading to an inference that leaders share more of facts based and positive or neutral information rather than statements in form of opinions.