Fear, Hope, and COVID-19: Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

ABSTRACT: Research shows that emotions matter in politics, and they matter during a public health crisis. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of emotional political rhetoric during the COVID-19 crisis is still missing. Based on parties' position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties), I expect differences in how specific emotions are employed and in how these messages actually influence the public. To test my hypotheses, I use word embeddings and neural network classifiers to measure fear and hope appeals in social media messages of political parties in four European countries. Furthermore, I rely on more than 1,400,000 public tweets of random citizens to estimate the impact of party messages. To do so, I employ vector autoregression (VAR) analysis to compare retweet volumes o

SUBMITTER: Widmann T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9347885 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature