Ideological Happiness Gap: Politicians’ Linguistic Expression on Twitter

22 Pages Posted: 28 Jun 2015

See all articles by Cheryl Au

Cheryl Au

University of California, Irvine

Sean P. Wojcik

University of California, Irvine

Peter H. Ditto

University of California, Irvine - School of Social Ecology

Date Written: June 5, 2015

Abstract

Previous research in political psychology has found an ideological happiness gap between political conservatives and liberals, in which conservatives report higher happiness levels than liberals; however, recent research has found that this ideological happiness gap essentially reverses when using unobtrusive behavioral measures of subjective well-being (SWB). In the present study, we conducted linguistic analyses on over 118,000 Twitter status updates collected from United States Senators, Representatives, and Governors' verified Twitter accounts to compare the negative and positive emotion word use of political liberals and conservatives. We conducted a two-part study, in which we compared the baseline emotionality of tweets between liberals and conservatives, and conducted a secondary analysis of how the elections affected emotionality. For the baseline analysis, our results were consistent with the findings from studies using unobtrusive behavioral measures of SWB: liberals expressed significantly more positive emotion words and less negative emotion. These results support recent findings of the ideological happiness gap that liberals display more positive emotion behaviors than liberals. For our secondary analysis, we did not find significant differences in positive emotion expression between the parties around the election; however, we found that Republicans became less negative after electoral success, while Democrats became more negative. Future research may shed more insight on political ideology differences in election outcomes during a bigger election, like the 2016 presidential elections.

Keywords: linguistic analysis, subjective well-being, political ideology, happiness, Twitter

Suggested Citation

Au, Cheryl and Wojcik, Sean P. and Ditto, Peter H., Ideological Happiness Gap: Politicians’ Linguistic Expression on Twitter (June 5, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2622586 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2622586

Cheryl Au (Contact Author)

University of California, Irvine ( email )

Campus Drive
Irvine, CA California 62697-3125
United States

Sean P. Wojcik

University of California, Irvine ( email )

Campus Drive
Irvine, CA California 62697-3125
United States

Peter H. Ditto

University of California, Irvine - School of Social Ecology ( email )

4312 Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway
Irvine, CA 92697
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
99
Abstract Views
814
Rank
482,506
PlumX Metrics