TWITTER AS A POLITICAL TOOL IN EU COUNTRIES DURING THE ECONOMIC CRISIS: A COMPARATIVE TEXT-MINING ANALYSIS
TWITTER AS A POLITICAL TOOL IN EU COUNTRIES DURING THE ECONOMIC CRISIS: A COMPARATIVE TEXT-MINING ANALYSIS

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the use of Twitter among politicians, in particular with regards to whether it was actively used during the economic crisis to promote economic agendas or rather merely to inform people. Forty-three thousand tweets of EU15 governments were collected, analysed using qualitative data analysis (text mining) and computational linguistics, using R statistical packages, and interpreted. The results show that Twitter is used primarily to inform. Only in selected cases was the tool also used to more actively promote economic agendas. This article contributes to the field of political communication by providing, to the best of our knowledge, a broad analytical and comparative overview of Twitter activity for political purposes in Europe using text-mining methods.

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