Sentiment analysis

Sentiment is a central topic for scholars of political communication. Despite its popularity, sentiment suffers from a lack of agreed-upon conceptualization and operationalization. The ambiguity and complexity is reflected in the applications of sentiment. Scholars have used sentiment as an analytical frame to describe and/or explain tonality of a (news) story, outlook or perspective in a (news) story, focus on conflict or consensus, and focus on incapability and misconduct, as well as the tone towards actors and organizations in media, political, and public discourse. Sentiment has especially gained popularity in the ‘text-as-data’ revolution due to the availability of data as well as computational text analysis methods. In this entry, we highlight the existing theoretical applications based on the core theories in political communication, as well as review the methodological toolkit to automatically measure sentiment. We thereby give an overview of the variety in approaches toward sentiment in political communication.