Impact and Diffusion of Sentiment in Political Communication - An Empirical Analysis of Political Weblogs

In this paper, we examine whether sentiment of political blog entries is associated with increased feedback in terms of the quantity of triggered comments and whether the diffusion of sentiment might take place in the political blogosphere. Based on a data set of approximately 17,000 blog entries from the 60 most important German political blogs, we find that blog entries with either more positive or more negative overall sentiment tend to receive significantly more comments compared to sentiment-neutral or mixedsentiment entries. Furthermore, our results show that positive as well as negative emotions might diffuse in the subsequent comments to corresponding blog entries.