Monitoring Public Interest and Sentiment on Basic Income: Using Google and Twitter Data in the U.S.

IF 1 Q3 ECONOMICS

Basic Income Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-01 DOI:10.1515/bis-2023-0002

Soomi Lee, Taeyong Park

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This study uses data from Google Trends and Twitter to analyze how public interest and sentiment towards Universal Basic Income (UBI) changed across all 50 states and Washington D.C. between 2018 and 2021. We specifically selected this time period as it includes both Andrew Yang’s UBI campaign during the Democratic primaries in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when UBI gained attention due to the federal government’s unconditional cash payment to almost all citizens. To overcome the limitations of sporadic opinion polls, we built on a recent development of the rescaling method to generate longitudinal Google Trends and conducted Twitter sentiment analysis. We observed a modest rise in public interest in UBI during Andrew Yang’s campaign, especially in blue states, and a significant increase across all states at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it quickly waned, the level of public attention became elevated compared to the pre-pandemic level. Contrary to previous studies, our analysis also reveals that overall sentiment became less positive after the peak interest during the pandemic, as more people engaged in online discussions.

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监测公众对基本收入的兴趣和情绪：使用美国谷歌和 Twitter 数据

本研究利用谷歌趋势（Google Trends）和推特（Twitter）的数据，分析了 2018 年至 2021 年间美国 50 个州和华盛顿特区公众对全民基本收入（UBI）的兴趣和情绪是如何变化的。我们特别选择了这一时期，因为其中包括了杨安德鲁（Andrew Yang）在 2019 年民主党初选期间发起的 UBI 运动和 2020 年 COVID-19 大流行，当时由于联邦政府向几乎所有公民无条件支付现金，UBI 引起了人们的关注。为了克服零星民意调查的局限性，我们利用最近开发的重新缩放方法生成了纵向谷歌趋势，并进行了推特情感分析。我们观察到，在杨安德鲁竞选期间，公众对 UBI 的兴趣略有上升，尤其是在蓝州，而在 COVID-19 大流行开始时，各州对 UBI 的兴趣显著上升。尽管公众关注度很快减弱，但与疫情爆发前相比，公众关注度有所提高。与之前的研究相反，我们的分析还显示，随着越来越多的人参与在线讨论，在大流行期间的关注高峰过后，整体情绪变得不那么积极。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Basic Income Studies ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.40

自引率

18.20%

发文量

期刊介绍： Basic income is a universal income grant available to every citizen without means test or work requirement. Academic discussion of basic income and related policies has been growing in the fields of economics, philosophy, political science, sociology, and public policy over the last few decades — with dozens of journal articles published each year, and basic income constituting the subject of more than 30 books in the last 10 years. In addition, the political discussion of basic income has been expanding through social organizations, NGOs and other advocacy groups. Internationally, recent years have witnessed the endorsement of basic income by grassroots movements as well as government officials in developing countries such as Brazil or South-Africa. As the community of people working on this issue has been expanding all over the world, incorporating grassroots activists, high profile academics — including several Nobel Prize winners in economics — and policymakers, the amount of high quality research on this topic has increased considerably. In the light of such extensive scholarship on this topic, the need to coordinate research efforts through a journal specifically devoted to basic income and cognate policies became pressing. Basic Income Studies (BIS) is the first academic journal to focus specifically on basic income and cognate policies.