Detecting Negative Campaigning on Twitter Against The Greens

Abstract

This article examines negative campaigning on Twitter against individual actors of the Green Party or against the party itself around the 2021 federal election in Germany. Based on hashtags and accounts, the various discourse elements from the social media are reconstructed and analyzed as a conceptual and thematic network. In doing so, the data will be examined using quantitative text analysis, sentiment analysis, dictionary-based comparison of populist communication style, and structural topic model. In addition, the framework of political discourse analysis is used to better interpret negative campaigning in context.