Purpose – Social network sites have been widely adopted by politicians in the last election campaigns. To increase the effectiveness of these campaigns the potential electorate is to be identified, as targeted ads are much more effective than non-targeted ads. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a new methodology for automatic prediction of political orientation of ...

Purpose – Reliability and political bias of mass media has been a controversial topic in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a methodology for fully automatic evaluation of the political tendency of the written media on the web, which does not rely on subjective human judgments. Design/methodology/approach – The underlying idea is to base the evaluation on full...

Every day media generate large amounts of text. An unbiased view on media reports requires an understanding of the political bias of media content. Assistive technology for estimating the political bias of texts can be helpful in this context. This study proposes a simple statistical learning approach to predict political bias from text. Standard text features extracted from speeches and manife...

Political text scaling aims to linearly order parties and politicians across political dimensions (e.g., left-to-right ideology) based on textual content (e.g., politician speeches or party manifestos). Existing models scale texts based on relative word usage and cannot be used for cross-lingual analyses. Additionally, there is little quantitative evidence that the output of these models correl...

Scholars wanting to estimate substantive quantities of interest, for example policy positions, from political texts typically apply a coding scheme to discrete text units such as words or sentences. Scales of policy positions, for example a left-right scale of economic policy, are typically built from the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. In this paper we reexa...

D eriving reliable and valid estimates of the policy positions of key actors is fundamental to the analysis of political competition. Various systematic methods have been used to do this, including surveys of voters, politicians, and political scientists, and the content analysis of policy documents. Each method has advantages and disadvantages but, for both theoretical and pragmatic reasons, p...

Anxiety has a special importance in politics since the emotion is tied to decision-making under uncertainty, a feature of democratic institutions. Yet, measuring specific emotions like anxiety in political settings remains a challenging task. The present study tackles this problem by making use of natural language processing (NLP) tools to detect anxiety in a corpus of digitized parliamentary d...

Meinungsanalyse auf politischen Textdaten hat im Bereich der Computerlinguistik in den letzten Jahren stets an Bedeutung gewonnen. Dabei werden politische Texte zumeist in voneinander diskrete Klassen unterteilt, wie zum Beispiel pro vs. contra oder links vs. rechts. In den Politikwissenschaften dagegen werden bei der Analyse von politischen Texten Positionen auf Skalen mit fließenden Werten ab...