Miu Nicole Takagi - The Effects of Political Martyrdom on Election Results: The Assassination of Abe

jdmdh:11391 - Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, September 22, 2023, NLP4DH - https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.11391
The Effects of Political Martyrdom on Election Results: The Assassination of AbeArticle

Authors: Miu Nicole Takagi 1

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.


Volume: NLP4DH
Published on: September 22, 2023
Accepted on: July 6, 2023
Submitted on: May 30, 2023
Keywords: Computer Science - Computation and Language

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