Voters' view of leaders during the Covid-19 crisis: Quantitative analysis of keyword descriptions provides strength and direction of evaluations.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Previous research suggests that governments usually gain support during crises such as the Covid-19. However, these findings are based on rating scales that only allow us to measure the strength of this support. This article proposes a new measure of how voters evaluate Prime Ministers (PM) by asking for descriptive keywords that are analyzed by natural language processing.

Methods

By collecting a representative sample of citizens' own key words describing their PM in 15 countries in Europe during the outbreak of Covid-19, and analyzing these by latent semantic analysis and a multiple OLS regression, we could quantify the strength and direction of voters' view.

Results

The strength analysis supported previous studies that describing the PM with positive wor

SUBMITTER: Freden A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8447460 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature