Towards Tracking Political Sentiment through Microblog Data

Abstract

People express and amplify political opin-ions in Microblogs such as Twitter, espe-cially when major political decisions are made. Twitter provides a useful vehicle for capturing and tracking popular opinion on burning issues of the day. In this paper, we focus on tracking the changes in polit-ical sentiment related to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and its decisions, fo-cusing on the key dimensions on support, emotional intensity, and polarity. Mea-suring changes in these sentiment dimen-sions could be useful for social and politi-cal scientists, policy makers, and the pub-lic. This preliminary work adapts existing sentiment analysis techniques to these new dimensions and the specifics of the cor-pus (Twitter). We illustrate the promise of our work with an important case study of tracking sentiment change building up to, and immediately following one recent landmark Supreme Court decision. This example illustrates how our work could help answer fundamental research ques-tions in political science about the nature of Supreme Court power and its capacity to influence public discourse. 1