One Kingdom, Two Nations:
Social Media Analysis of Scottish National Party and UK Independence Party
Justin Chun-ting Ho
University of Edinburgh
Why SNP and UKIP?
- Both invoked the image of an institutional oppressor
- Both invoked a version of nationalism
- Shallow similarities, vastly different on closer examination
Scottish National Party
- "Democratic Deficit" - Emphasized during the Scottish Independence Referendum (2014), reiterated after the EU Referendum (2016)
- Liberal Nationalism
- Depicted as a multicultural and progressive nation
UK Independence Party
- "Take back control" from Brussel.
- Insular nationalism
- Migrants as economic and security threats
- A "negative project" driven by "resentment, frustration, and anger"
Research Questions:
1. Are there differences between the sentiment expressed within SNP and UKIP's Facebook posts?
2. Do SNP and UKIP's Facebook posts inspire different emotions?
Methodology
Why Facebook?
- Social media has become an important medium for political communication
- Current discourse studies focus mostly on traditional media, eg newspaper and television
- Digital trace as data for understanding the interaction between parties and the people
Data Collection
Source: Facebook posts and comments on SNP and UKIP's official page
Time period: 25 May 2015 - 30 April 2017
A total of 2,989 posts (SNP: 1,752; UKIP: 1,237) and
1.2 million comments (SNP: 571k; UKIP: 660k) were collected
Data Analysis
- Keyword Analysis
- Sentiment Analysis
Keyword Analysis
Keyword Analysis
What is a Keyword?
“A keyword may be defined as a word which occurs with unusual frequency in a given text.”
“The keyness of a keyword represents the value of log-likelihood or Chi-square statistics”
(Scott 1997: 233-45)
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis
What is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis (aka. opinion mining), is the field of study that analyzes people’s opinions and feelings towards entities.
Lexicons:
- Bing Liu's Sentiment Lexicon
(Hu & Bing 2004) - NRC Emotion Lexicon
(Mohammad & Turney 2013)
Conclusion
- The sentiment expressed within UKIP's Facebook posts is more negative than that of SNP
- UKIP inspired more negative emotions while there is no substantial difference in positive emotions
Thank you very much!
Twitter: @justin_ct_ho
Github: justinchuntingho
Email: Jusitn.Ho@ed.ac.uk
References
- Ashcroft, R. T. and Bevir, M. 2018. 'Liberal democracy, nationalism and culture: multiculturalism and Scottish independence', Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21(1): 65–86.
- Calhoun, C. 2016. 'Brexit Is a Mutiny Against the Cosmopolitan Elite', New Perspectives Quarterly 33(3): 50–8.
- Hobolt, S. B. 2016. 'The Brexit vote: a divided nation, a divided continent', Journal of European Public Policy 23(9): 1259–77.
- Hu, M. and Liu, B. 2004. 'Mining and Summarizing Customer Reviews', in Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD ’04, New York, NY, USA: ACM: pp. 168–77.
- Liu, B. 2015. Sentiment Analysis : Mining Opinions, Sentiments, and Emotions.
- McGarvey, N. and Stewart, F. 2016. 'European, not British? Scottish Nationalism and the EU Referendum' in Guderian M (ed.), The Future of the UK - Between Internal and External Divisions, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Zentralinstitut Großbritannien - Zentrum: pp. 59–70.
- Mohammad, S. and Turney, P. D. 2013. 'Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon', Computational Intelligence 29(3): 436–65.
- Scott, M. 1997. 'PC analysis of key words — And key key words', System, Pergamon 25(2): 233–45.
- Scottish Government. 2013. Scotland’s Future Edinburgh: Scottish Government.
- Virdee, S. and McGeever, B. 2017. 'Racism, Crisis, Brexit', Ethnic and Racial Studies: 1–18.
One Kingdom, Two Nations: Social Media Analysis of Scottish National Party and UK Independence Party
Justin Chun-ting Ho
University of Edinburgh