Volatility in the Issue Attention Economy

08/27/2018
by   Chico Q. Camargo, et al.
0

Recent election surprises and regime changes have left the impression that politics has become more fast-moving and unstable. While modern politics does seem more volatile, there is little systematic evidence to support this claim. This paper seeks to address this gap in knowledge by reporting data over the last seventy years using public opinion polls and traditional media data from the UK and Germany. These countries are good cases to study because both have experienced considerable changes in electoral behaviour and have new political parties during the time period studied. We measure volatility in public opinion and in media coverage using approaches from information theory, tracking the change in word-use patterns across over 700,000 articles. Our preliminary analysis suggests an increase in the number of opinion issues over time and a growth in lack of predictability of the media series from the 1970s.

READ FULL TEXT

page 6

page 9

research
12/08/2020

Do Mass Media Shape Public Opinion toward China? Quantitative Evidence on New York Times with Deep Learning

Do mass media influence people's opinion of other countries? Using BERT,...
research
07/04/2022

Terrorist attacks sharpen the binary perception of "Us" vs. "Them"

Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention,...
research
04/29/2021

Post-war Civil War Propaganda Techniques and Media Spins in Nigeria and Journalism Practice

In public relations and political communication, a spin is a form of pro...
research
10/25/2017

Do two parties represent the US? Clustering analysis of US public ideology survey

Recent surveys have shown that an increasing portion of the US public be...
research
07/25/2022

On the Relation Between Opinion Change and Information Consumption on Reddit

While much attention has been devoted to the causes of opinion change, l...
research
05/29/2021

Correcting public opinion trends through Bayesian data assimilation

Measuring public opinion is a key focus during democratic elections, ena...
research
05/19/2020

Every Colour You Are: Stance Prediction and Turnaround in Controversial Issues

Web platforms have allowed political manifestation and debate for decade...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset