title: Measuring Emotion in Parliamentary Debates with Automated Textual Analysis.
abstract: An impressive breadth of interdisciplinary research suggests that emotions have an influence on human behavior. Nonetheless, we still know very little about the emotional states of those actors whose daily decisions have a lasting impact on our societies: politicians in parliament. We address this question by making use of methods of natural language processing and a digitized corpus of text data spanning a century of parliamentary debates in the United Kingdom. We use this approach to examine changes in aggregate levels of emotional polarity in the British parliament, and to test a hypothesis about the emotional response of politicians to economic recessions. Our findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the mood of politicians has become more positive during the past decades, and that variations in emotional polarity can be predicted by the state of the national economy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
authors.forename: Ludovic
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Rheault
authors.affiliation: Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Kaspar
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Beelen
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cochrane
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
authors.forename: Graeme
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hirst
mesh_terms: D001519:Behavior; D004467:Economics; D004644:Emotions; D000071296:Government Employees / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011057:Politics; D006113:United Kingdom