The greatest weapon of political campaigns : Sentiment and emotion analysis of us presidential cam-paign speeches = A politikai kampányok legnagyobb fegyvere : Az amerikai elnöki kampánybeszédek hangulat- és érzelemelemzése

Abstract

The study investigates what kind of sentiments and emotions politicians use in their campaign speeches to convince citizens and gain their vote. Emotions play an important role in political campaigns, decision-makers influence people, not just by factual information but by emotions too, which can alter their political behavior, thus it is important to study these campaigning tools. By analyzing the presidential candidates of the 2020 US election, the 1st hypothesis is that the candidates prevailingly used negative sentiment because of the theory of media nega-tivity. The second hypothesis is that Donald Trump used less negative and more positive senti-ment than Joe Biden because of his incumbent position. The 3rd question is what kind of emo-tions they dominantly use. The paper used machine learning-based sentiment analysis to test whether politicians dominantly use negative sentiment and used lexicon-based emotional anal-ysis to detect what kind of emotions they prevailingly use in campaign rhetoric. By analyzing the 2020 US election campaign speeches, the research concluded that they both prevailingly use negative sentiment which confirms our 1st hypothesis. Trump used more negativity and positivity as well, compared to Biden who used more neutral rhetoric so the 2nd hypothesis of the study is not confirmed. Besides, both of the candidates dominantly express trust and antic-ipation in their campaign speeches, yet Biden formulated these more, compared to Trump. The study also discussed the role of these results in political campaigns.