Twitter language samples reflect collective emotional responses following political leaders’ rhetoric during the pandemic across four countries

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the global public has relied on their political leaders to guide them through the crisis. The current study investigated if and how political leader’s rhetoric would be associated with collective emotional responses. We used text analytical methods to investigate association between political leader speech and daily aggregates of expressed emotions on Twitter. We collected posts concerning Covid-19 and all speeches by the highest executive power from the USA, UK, Germany, and Switzerland. We applied cross Show more