Twitter, Trump, and Coronavirus
When Does Public Opinion Win?Heads of government all over the world use Twitter to express their opinions and choices, support electoral campaigns, and engage in dialogue with citizens. Especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic – an enormous shock hurting economies, societies, and cultures – virtual communication has become the predominant (and safest) form of interpersonal exchange, subsequently gaining influence on people’s behavior.
How can we grasp and measure the impact of political leaders‘ communication strategies on the perception and attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences for our everyday reality? And how does message delivery differ across politicians and why? Using Biterm Topic Models and advanced quantitative text analysis methods in R, this project investigates patterns of Corona-related political communication with Twitter data from January to August 2020 for over hundred heads of government.
Aleksandra Butneva
Research Assistant at the Chair for Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences and the School of Business Informatics
I am a Research Assistant and at the University of Mannheim in Germany, Chair for Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences. I research at the intersection of data science, political methodology, and comparative politics. I specialize in machine learning and innovation management, developing NLP-based applications for political science questions.