Emotional Reactions and the Pulse of Public Opinion: Measuring the Impact of Political Events on the Sentiment of Online Discussions

TL;DR

This study analyzes online political discussions to measure emotional content and disagreement, revealing correlations with presidential approval and insights into public opinion shifts during major events.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of assessing public opinion through emotional analysis of online discussions, linking digital sentiment to offline political approval.

Findings

Online emotional content predicts presidential approval rates.

Disagreement and polarization are measurable through deviations in emotional dimensions.

The approach provides insights into mechanisms driving public opinion changes.

Abstract

This paper analyses changes in public opinion by tracking political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online. Unlike polls or surveys, our approach does not elicit opinions but approximates what the public thinks by analysing the discussions in which they decide to take part. We measure the emotional content of online discussions in three dimensions (valence, arousal and dominance), paying special attention to deviation around average values, which we use as a proxy for disagreement and polarisation. We show that this measurement of public opinion helps predict presidential approval rates, suggesting that there is a point of connection between online discussions (often deemed not representative of the overall population) and offline polls. We also show that this measurement provides a deeper understanding of the individual mechanisms that drive aggregated shifts in public opinion. Our data spans a period that includes two US presidential elections, the attacks of September 11, and the start of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.