Twitter as a Political Tool in EU Countries During The Economic Crisis: A Comparative Text-Mining Analysis

Abstract

This paper analyses the use of Twitter among politicians, in
particular with regards to whether it was actively used during
the economic crisis to promote economic agendas or rather
merely to inform people. Forty-three thousand tweets of EU15
governments were collected, analysed using qualitative data
analysis (text mining) and computational linguistics, using R
statistical packages, and interpreted. The results show that
Twitter is used primarily to inform. Only in selected cases was
the tool also used to more actively promote economic
agendas. This article contributes to the field of political
communication by providing, to the best of our knowledge, a
broad analytical and comparative overview of Twitter activity
for political purposes in Europe using text-mining methods.