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Measuring Emotion in Parliamentary Debates with Automated Textual Analysis

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  • Ludovic Rheault
  • Kaspar Beelen
  • Christopher Cochrane
  • Graeme Hirst

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Ludovic Rheault & Kaspar Beelen & Christopher Cochrane & Graeme Hirst, 2016. "Measuring Emotion in Parliamentary Debates with Automated Textual Analysis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(12), pages 1-18, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0168843
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168843
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    Cited by:

    1. Anna Lou Abatayo & John Lynham & Katerina Sherstyuk, 2020. "Communication, Expectations, and Trust: An Experiment with Three Media," Games, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-26, October.
    2. Rauh, Christian, 2022. "Supranational emergency politics? What executives’ public crisis communication may tell us," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 29(6), pages 966-978.
    3. Mubashir Qasim, 2019. "Sustainability and Wellbeing: A Text Analysis of New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, Official Yearbooks and Ministerial Documents," Working Papers in Economics 19/01, University of Waikato.
    4. Gavin Abercrombie & Riza Batista-Navarro, 2020. "Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 3(1), pages 245-270, April.

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