The Effects of Political Martyrdom on Election Results: The Assassination of Abe

In developed nations assassinations are rare and thus the impact of such acts on the electoral and political landscape is understudied. In this paper, we focus on Twitter data to examine the effects of Japan's former Primer Minister Abe's assassination on the Japanese House of Councillors...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of data mining and digital humanities Vol. NLP4DH
Main Author: Takagi, Miu Nicole
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Nicolas Turenne 22.09.2023
Subjects:
ISSN:2416-5999, 2416-5999
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In developed nations assassinations are rare and thus the impact of such acts on the electoral and political landscape is understudied. In this paper, we focus on Twitter data to examine the effects of Japan's former Primer Minister Abe's assassination on the Japanese House of Councillors elections in 2022. We utilize sentiment analysis and emotion detection together with topic modeling on over 2 million tweets and compare them against tweets during previous election cycles. Our findings indicate that Twitter sentiments were negatively impacted by the event in the short term and that social media attention span has shortened. We also discuss how "necropolitics" affected the outcome of the elections in favor of the deceased's party meaning that there seems to have been an effect of Abe's death on the election outcome though the findings warrant further investigation for conclusive results.
ISSN:2416-5999
2416-5999
DOI:10.46298/jdmdh.11391