Emotions in politics

Emotions are everywhere. Especially in politics.
Recently, The Oxford Dictionaries announced that its Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth.

‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential
in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’

- 'Post-truth' according to The Oxford Dictionaries

The frequent use of a word such as 'post-truth' indicates that people seem to think that politics are increasingly prefering emotions to fact. Pathos to logos. But is this true? We investigated how emotions are showing in the Danish parliament and on Danish politicians' Twitter feeds. The Danish parliament dataset was extracted using web scraping from transcipted parliament meetings and the twitter dataset was generated using the twitter API and contains tweets from 149 Danish politicians.

Emotions over time

Let's get an overview of the emotional spectrum by looking at the weekly average of emotions on Danish politicians' Twitter and in the parliament:

The graphs seem to be quite well correlated. It should be noted that the method of calculating the sentiments was to add up positive and negative sentiment values of each word in a text. Averaging the blocks of text makes it more likely for longer text blocks to have extreme values (positive or negative), which is probably why the sentiment of the parliament is generally higher than on twitter.

How are politicians sentiment in the parliament compared to their twitter sentiment?

We sometimes experience that people behave different in real life compared to their online behaviour. Examining the sentiment of tweets from danish politicians and comparing it to the sentiment of when they are talking in the parliament meetings shows the average and standard deviation of each politicians sentiment both on twitter and in the meetings. A high average sentiment and low standard deviation sentiment implies a high sentiment in general while a high standard deviation implies a high level of expressivenes.

The chart suggests that Henrik Sass Larsen has a very high sentiment on Twitter while having a more average sentiment in the parliament. Furthermore Pernille Rosenkrantz has the highest standard deviation on twitter, this implies that she is very expressive in both negative and positive tweets.

How are emotions showing on Danish politicians' Twitter feeds?

The sentiment averages of politicians own tweets (retweets not counted) was used as a basis for creating lists of top most positive tweets and top most negative tweets.
Top 3 positive tweets:

DF seems to be the happiest party on Twitter, but...

Søren Espersen's tweet that is ranked as the second happiest in our records is a great example of a quirk when calculating sentiments using a list of labelled words.
When reading the tweet as a human, it is obvious that the tweet is sarcastic and not very positive. However, being limited to look at each word, our algorithm count the long string of Ha-ha-ha... as very positive.
Now, let's have a look at the top 3 negative tweets:

The most negative tweets ranges from angry, to sad, to ... X-Factor.
One interesting observation is the distribution of positive/negative politicians based on their party. The top positive tweets mostly include right-wing politicians, while the top negative tweets only include left-wing politicians.