Ideological Happiness Gap: Politicianss Linguistic Expression on Twitter

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.