The Sentiment of Electronic Petitions as a Trigger of Social and Political Mobilization

Student: Kozlova Anastasiia

Faculty: Faculty of Humanities (Nizhny Novgorod)

Educational Programme: Political Linguistics (Master)

Final Grade: 10

Year of Graduation: 2018

The goal of this work is to analyze and characterize the emotive space of online petitions with respect to linguistic determinants of success. The study was based on 22450 electronic petitions collected from Change.org in the period from 2012 to 2016. The following methods were used: discourse analysis (analysis of language forms, their functions in communication), comparative analysis, topic modeling and statistical analysis. Sentiment analysis (based on tonal dictionaries and rules) was a key method of analyzing empirical data. The results we obtained indicate that the hypothesis of the independence of petitions success on linguistic factors and the absence of differences in the sentiment types of successful and unsuccessful petitions cannot be confirmed.

Full text (added June 8, 2019)

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