An Analysis of Political Viewson Blogs

Todd Sullivan

General Layout of Project

• 8 Classes– Candidates: Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin– Parties: Republicans, Democrats, Liberals,

Conservatives

• Extract opinions about each class– Compute a FeelScore metric for each

author/class pair (provided the author mentioned the class)

• Do stuff with the FeelScores

Extracting Opinions

• Define three lists– Class Names– Word Synonyms– Feeling Indicators

• Tokenize blog posts into sentences• Find sentence that contain a class name

– Count number of positive/negative Feeling Indicators

– Apply counts to classes in sentence

Class Names

• Obama:– obama, senator of illinois, senator from

illinois, illinois senator, democrat president, democratic president, …

• Palin– palin, alaskan governor, governor of alaska,

alaska governor, republican vp, …

• Liberals– liberals, liberal, libs

Word Synonyms

• Bad– worst, unpleasant, disastrous, dirty, failure,

sucks, sux, traitor, idiot, loser, noob, dumb, …

• Good– awesome, sweet, cool, groovy, comforting,

glorious, dandy, brilliant, best, wonderful, …

• Skip Words– Very, usually, still, much, nearly, most, more,

frankly, a, an, any kind of punctuation, …

Feeling Indicators

• Negative Indicators– :is: :bad:, :bad: :plans:, :plans: :is: :bad:,

:i: do :not: want, :i: cannot stand, how :bad:, :is: :not: :good:, :i: disagree:, :i: do :not:, …

• Positive Indicators– :is: experienced, :i: agree, :i: will vote,

for president, :i: support, :i: donated,:good: speaker, …

FeelScore

• For each author a and class c

,,,,

,,,,,

),()},({1,,

),()},({1,,

log

log

caCountcaCount

caCountcaCountcaFeelScore

sorsNumIndicatcsHasClasscaCount

sorsNumIndicatcsHasClasscaCount

asBb bSentencess

asBb bSentencess

1,1, caFeelScore

Incorporating Interests and Communities

• Pull all unique interests containing one of the class’ names (obama, mccain, …)– Returns around 350 interests– Small enough to label as positive, negative, or

remove.

• Same process for communities

Positive InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count

Obama 33 201McCain 5 14Biden 4 6Palin 7 48

Negative InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count

Obama 2 3McCain 3 5Biden 0 0Palin 5 6

Positive InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count

Republicans 25 118Democrats 41 373Liberals 100 605Conservatives 38 112

Negative InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count

Republican 15 28Democrat 2 3Liberal 12 13Conservative 10 17

Interesting Interests

• Positive Interests– Not interesting: obama, mccain 08, republican

• Negative Interests– _doing_something_ to _class_

where _doing_something_ is:

anti, testing, baiting, bashing, hating,pissing off, cockpunching,forced lobotomization of, death to

Positive CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count

Obama 26 206McCain 6 15Biden 1 3Palin 5 17

Negative CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count

Obama 1 9McCain 2 13Biden 0 0Palin 3 11

Positive CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count

Republicans 8 26Democrats 19 111Liberals 45 281Conservatives 9 17

Negative CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count

Republicans 0 0Democrats 0 0Liberals 3 10Conservatives 0 0

Example Communities

• Positive– Obama PA, GothsForObama,

TeenRepublicans

• Negative– Anti-Obama, nobama, WTF-Palin

Authors Listing Multiple Interests for the Same Class

Authors Joining Multiple Communities for the Same Class

FeelScores Across Time

• For an author a, class c, and day Day

,,,,,,

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2

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2

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),()},({1,,,

),()},({1,,,

2008,1,

2008,1,

,log

,log

DaycaAdjCountDaycaAdjCount

DaycaAdjCountDaycaAdjCountDaycaFeelScore

dcaCountDaycaAdjCount

dcaCountDaycaAdjCount

sorsNumIndicatcsHasClassdcaCount

sorsNumIndicatcsHasClassdcaCount

Day

JanddDaydayDiff

Day

JanddDaydayDiff

dasBb bSentencess

dasBb bSentencess

Including Interests and Communities

• Count an interest or community as 5 positive or negative counts added to AdjCount(a,c,Day,...) for all days on and after the interest or community was added to the database.

FeelScores Across Time Continued…

• For a class c, and day Day

DaycAuthors

DaycaFeelScore

DaycFeelScore

DaydsomeforAuthorsaa

DaycAuthors

DaycAuthorsa

,

,,

,

dc,a,FeelScore&|

,

,

Overall Blog-basedCandidate FeelScores

Overall Blog-basedParty FeelScores

Positive/Negative Candidate Chatter by Blog Network

Blog-based Candidate FeelScores Across Networks

Blog-based Party FeelScores Across Networks

Positive/Negative ChatterCandidate by Gender

Blog-based Candidate FeelScores Across Gender

Blog-based PartyFeelScores Across Gender

National Conventions

National ConventionsNew Authors

National ConventionsChanging Opinions

Presidential Debates

Presidential Debates Cont…

Vice Presidential Debate

VP Debate Cont…

Obama & McCainFeelScores by Network

National Conventionsby Network

McCain & PalinFeelScores by Network

Party FeelScores by Network

Aggregate FeelScoresby Gender

Age Ranges

Aggregate FeelScores by Age

Older People Don’t Like Liberals

Friend Networks

• 523 Democrats and 620 Republicans• 1,575 mutual links

– 64% Democrat-Republican links (Green)– 23.6% Democrat-Democrat links (Blue)– 12.4% Republican-Republican links (Red)

• The 64% number is largely influenced by a few authors. In a macro-average across authors, 50.9% of a blogger’s friends are from the blogger’s party.

Percent of Bloggersvs. Number of Friends

Political BloggingFriend Network

National Convention Poll Data

Predicting the Popular Vote

• No data after October 28, 2008, so we use Oct. 28 data for calculations.

• For each author a

Classesc

Classesc

nullOctcaFeelScore

OctcaFeelScorecPartyaLeaning

DemocratpublicanPalinMcCaincif

LiberalDemocratBidenObamacifcParty

28,,1

28,,

,Re,,1

,,,1

Assigning Votes Continued

a

a

a

aLeaningotersUndecidedV

sMcCainVote

aLeaningotersUndecidedV

ObamaVotes

aLeaningotersUndecidedV

aLeaning

1.012

1.012

1.0,1.01

1,1

Popular Vote

Classes Used Obama McCain# of

AuthorsObamaMcCain 56.5% 43.4% 3,790

Obama-Bidenvs.

McCain-Palin53.6% 46.4% 4,470

Obama-Biden-Democratvs.

McCain-Palin-Republican51.8% 48.2% 5,217

Obama-Biden-Democrat-Liberal

vs.McCain-Palin-

Republican-Conservative

51.2% 48.8% 5,832

• Actual Result: Obama 53%, McCain 46%

Exit Polls by GenderCNN Exit Poll Results

Gender Obama McCain # Polled

Female 56% 44% 9,453Male 51% 49% 8,740

Predicted Results

Gender Obama McCain# of

AuthorsFemale 55.4% 44.6% 261Male 54.1% 45.9% 636

Exit Polls by AgeCNN Exit Poll Results

Age Obama McCain # Polled

18 to 29 67% 33% 3,21030 to 44 53% 47% 5,08345 to 64 50% 50% 6,689

65+ 46% 54% 2,854

Predicted Poll Results

Age Obama McCain# of

Authors18 to 29 60.4% 39.6% 47630 to 44 56.8% 43.2% 29445 to 64 57.0% 43.0% 135

65+ 33.3% 67.7% 36

Questions?