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Voters' view of leaders during the Covid-19 crisis: Quantitative analysis of keyword descriptions provides strength and direction of evaluations
Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (starting 2013), Department of Political, Historical, Religious and Cultural Studies (from 2013).ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0820-8626
Lund University.
2021 (English)In: Social Science Quarterly, ISSN 0038-4941, E-ISSN 1540-6237, Vol. 102, no 5, p. 2170-2183Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Objectives Previous research suggests that governments usually gain support during crises such as the Covid-19. However, these findings are based on rating scales that only allow us to measure the strength of this support. This article proposes a new measure of how voters evaluate Prime Ministers (PM) by asking for descriptive keywords that are analyzed by natural language processing. Methods By collecting a representative sample of citizens' own key words describing their PM in 15 countries in Europe during the outbreak of Covid-19, and analyzing these by latent semantic analysis and a multiple OLS regression, we could quantify the strength and direction of voters' view. Results The strength analysis supported previous studies that describing the PM with positive words was strongly associated with vote intention. Furthermore, a change in the direction of the attitudes from "good" to "honest" was found. A new finding was that the pandemic was associated with an increase in polarization. Conclusions The keyword evaluation analysis provides opportunities of evaluating both strength and direction of voters' view of their PM, where we show new results related to increased polarization and shift in the direction of attitudes.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
John Wiley & Sons, 2021. Vol. 102, no 5, p. 2170-2183
Keywords [en]
approval ratings, Covid-19, Prime Ministers, quantitative text analysis, sympathy score
National Category
Political Science
Research subject
Political Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-85846DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.13036ISI: 000681700800001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85111874029OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-85846DiVA, id: diva2:1591679
Available from: 2021-09-07 Created: 2021-09-07 Last updated: 2026-02-12Bibliographically approved

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Fredén, Annika

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • apa.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf