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Political Communication Patterns and Sentiments Across Time on Twitter in the 2017 Election in the Netherlands

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A longstanding maxim of urban research is that neighbourhood reputations matter. The subjective narratives and stereotypes about a neighbourhood influence a range of consequential processes, outcomes and inequalities. Yet, there remains considerable ambiguity regarding the primary drivers of the neighbourhood status hierarchy. What are the primary factors responsible for neighbourhood reputations? How and why do reputations change over time? Unfortunately, efforts to answer such questions have been hampered by methodological limitations, most notably the lack of a universal measure allowing comparisons between every neighbourhood in a given city. In an effort to address this shortcoming, this article offers a novel computational approach for generating a systematic measure, which we refer to as a ‘neighbourhood reputation score’. Leveraging a sentiment analysis method to examine every newspaper article published by the Chicago Tribune mentioning at least one of Chicago’s 77 community areas across five decades, we find that neighbourhood reputation scores are negatively associated with the proportion of Black residents in a neighbourhood. Although the strength of the relationship between ethno-racial composition and reputation increases over time, neighbourhoods in Chicago did not experience sufficient compositional shifts to assess whether demographic changes lead to reputational changes. These findings represent the most systematic evidence to date in support of the theory that ethno-racial stigma is the most influential driver of the neighbourhood status hierarchy.
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Conventional wisdom holds that party leaders matter in democratic elections. As very few voters have direct contact with party leaders, media are voters’ primary source of information about these leaders and, thus, the likely origin of leader effects on party support. Our study focuses on these supposed electoral effects of the media coverage of party leaders. We examine the positive and negative effects of specific leadership images in Dutch newspapers on vote intentions. To this end, we combine an extensive automated content analysis of leadership images in the media with a panel data set, the Dutch 1Vandaag Opinion Panel (1VOP), consisting of more than fifty thousand unique respondents and 110 waves of interviews conducted between September 2006 and September 2012. The results confirm that media coverage of party leaders’ character traits affects voters: Positive mediated leadership images increase support for the leader’s party, while negative images decrease this support. However, this influence is not unconditional: During campaign periods, positive leadership images have a stronger effect, while negative images no longer have an impact on subsequent vote intentions.
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We study the personalization of voting behaviour in European Parliament elections. We argue that information from the media is crucial for providing linkages between candidates and voters. Moreover, we contend that candidates can serve as information short-cuts given the complexity of European Union politics. We use a four-wave Dutch panel survey and a media study that enable us to link evaluations of lead candidates, party preferences, and vote choice to exposure to news about these candidates. We show, firstly, that exposure to candidate news is a strong explanatory factor for candidate recognition. Secondly, we find that candidate evaluations positively affect party choice, albeit mainly for those voters who tend to be politically aware. Our research has implications for debates about the European Union’s accountability deficit.
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This dataset provides data on electoral volatility and its internal components in parliamentary elections (lower house) of 19 Western European countries for the 1945-2015 period. It covers the entire universe of Western European elections held after World War II under democratic regimes. Data for Greece, Portugal and Spain have been collected after their democratizations in the 1970s. Altogether, a total of 339 elections (or, more precisely, electoral periods) are included.
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Until the sixties a salient feature of Dutch society was its 'pillarization', the segmentation of society in religious and secular blocs and subcultures. Each bloc had set up a whole array of organizations encompassing practically every sphere of social life. In the last three decades a number of both structural and cultural developments set in a process of depillarization. Based on longitudinal Dutch survey data - covering the 1958-1992 period - subjective identification with formerly pillarized ideologies is analyzed. It is found that identification has indeed diminished substantially, though primarily with religious ideologies. This article primarily addresses the issue of whether deconfessionalization or de-ideologization is the prime mover behind the decline of pillarized ideological identifications. It is found that in the first stages of depillarization deconfessionalization of Dutch society induced a process towards a decline of pillarized religious self-perceptions, while identification with pillarized secular attitudes remained rather stable. In more recent years de-ideologization became more prominent. Furthermore, it is observed that changes in ideological self-perceptions are particularly to be found among confessional groups who have become both smaller in number and less convinced of beliefs and behaviors traditionally linked with pillarized ideologies.
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This article analyses the use of social media by both candidates and citizens in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary election campaign. Utilizing data on the candidates' use of various social media sites, survey data from the 2011 Finnish election study, and survey data from a Finnish panel, the analyses reveal that the significance of social media was generally modest in the election campaign. The findings show that although candidates did use social media extensively, the on-line electoral patterns were found to be mostly normalized. The citizens' use of social media in the campaign was also very low and its impact on their voting decision even smaller. However, the irrelevance of political interest in explaining extensive social media use, found in the analyses, break established patterns explaining political participation.
Book
This edited work presents studies and discussions that clarify the challenges and opportunities of sentiment analysis research. While sentiment analysis research has become very popular in the past ten years, most companies and researchers still approach it simply as a polarity detection problem. In reality, sentiment analysis is a ‘suitcase problem’ that requires tackling many natural language processing subtasks, including microtext analysis, sarcasm detection, anaphora resolution, subjectivity detection and aspect extraction. In this book, the authors propose an overview of the main issues and challenges associated with current sentiment analysis research and provide some insights on practical tools and techniques that can be exploited to both advance the state of the art in all sentiment analysis subtasks and explore new areas in the same context. Readers will discover sentiment mining techniques that can be exploited for the creation and automated upkeep of review and opinion aggregation websites, in which opinionated text and videos are continuously gathered from the Web and not restricted to just product reviews, but also to wider topics such as political issues and brand perception. The book also enables researchers to see how affective computing and sentiment analysis have a great potential as a sub-component technology for other systems. They can enhance the capabilities of customer relationship management and recommendation systems allowing, for example, to find out which features customers are particularly happy about or to exclude from the recommendations items that have received very negative feedbacks. Similarly, they can be exploited for affective tutoring and affective entertainment or for troll filtering and spam detection in online social communication.
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Historically, a “feminine communication style” has not been a welcomed addition to the masculinized arena of American campaigning. But this style’s personalized and interactive elements have started to gain a foothold in digital campaigning because it mimics the intimacy of retail politics and face-to-face campaigning. To examine whether candidates are incorporating a feminine communication style in a mediated campaign setting, this study features a content analysis of U.S. Senate candidates’ campaign Twitter feeds during the 2012 election cycle, and explores the differences across candidate gender and electoral success for personalization and interactivity. Results revealed that men and women were similar in their incorporation of personalization, and women were more interactive than men. Further, the type of personalization and interactivity contributed differently to electoral success for women and men.
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This book will analyze three aspects of gender and political campaigns: how female and male candidates present themselves to voters through their mass media messages (television spot ads and Web sites), how the media present these candidates through their news coverage, and how voters respond to the candidates' mass media strategies. The significance of this work stems from our comprehensive examination of the messages as we identify female and male communication styles used in mass media settings, coupled with our research on the news coverage of candidates in mixed-gender races and our study of how voters respond to the strategic messages designed by the candidates. Female and male candidates use similar self-presentation strategies as well as strategies that differ; however, voter perceptions dictate the ultimate success and appropriateness of those candidate images.
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Party leaders are the main actors controlling campaign strategies, policy agendas, and government formation in advanced parliamentary democracies. Little is known, however, about gender and party leadership. This article examines gendered leadership patterns across 71 political parties in 11 parliamentary democracies between 1965 and 2013. It shows that men and women have different access to, and experiences in, party leadership and that these gendered political opportunity structures are shaped by parties' political performances. Women are more likely to initially come to power in minor opposition parties and those that are losing seat share. Once selected for the position, female leaders are more likely to retain office when their parties gain seats, but they are also more likely to leave the post when faced with an unfavorable trajectory. Together, these results demonstrate that prospective female leaders are playing by a different (and often more demanding) set of rules than their male counterparts.
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In this article, we examine the programmatic reactions to the rise of populist parties. It has been argued that populism is not necessarily the prerogative of populist parties; it has been adopted by mainstream parties as well. The article investigates whether populism is contagious. On the basis of the results of a content analysis of election manifestos of parties in five Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom), we conclude that the programmes of mainstream parties have not become more populist in recent years. We find no evidence that mainstream parties change their programmes when confronted with electoral losses or successful populist challengers. Yet, we do find that populist parties change their own programmes when they have been successful: Their initial success makes them tone down their populism.