Commenting on Political Topics Through Twitter: Is European Politics European?

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore social media, and specifically Twitter’s potential to generate a European demos. Our use of data derived from social media complements the traditional use of mass media and survey data within existing studies. We selected two Twitter hashtags of European relevance, # schengen and # ttip, to test several theories on a European demos (non-demos, European democracy, or pan-European demos) and to determine which of these theories was most applicable in the case of Twitter topics of European relevance. To answer the research question, we performed sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis performed on data gathered on social media platforms, such as Twitter, constitutes an alternative methodological approach to more formal surveys (e.g., Eurobarometer) and mass media content analysis. Three dimensions were coded: (1) sentiments toward the issue public, (2) sentiments toward the European Union (EU), and (3) the type of framing. Among all of the available algorithms for conducting sentiment analysis, integrated sentiment analysis (iSA), developed by the Blog of Voices at the University of Milan, was selected for the data analysis. This is a novel supervised algorithm that was specifically designed for analyses of social networks and the Web 2.0 sphere (Twitter, blogs, etc.), taking the abundance of noise within digital environments into consideration. An examination and discussion of the results shows that for these two hashtags, the results were more aligned with the demoicracy and “European lite identity” models than with the model of a pan-European demos.