Goals

Work Package 2 – titled “What are they Talking About? Leaders’ Attention to and Position on the Economic Crisis and the EU” – aims at measuring preferences and sentiments conveyed by European politicians in their speeches.

Achievements

As of December 2017, we published 2 papers and a dataset. In addition, we organized a successful conference on automated text analysis, which forms the methodological core of our work:

•    Dataset: EUSpeech,  doi:10.7910/DVN/XPCVEI (Gijs Schumacher, Martijn Schoonvelde, Tanushree Dahiya & Erik de Vries)
•    Paper: No Longer Lost in Translation. Evidence that Google Translate Works for Comparative Bag-of-Words Text Applications. (Erik de Vries, Martijn Schoonvelde & Gijs Schumacher) Conditional Acceptance at Political Analysis
•    Paper: EUSpeech: a new dataset of EU elite speeches. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Advances in Computational Analysis of Political Text, Dubrovnik, 75–80 (Gijs Schumacher, Martijn Schoonvelde, Denise Traber, Tanushree Dahiya & Erik de Vries)
•    Conference: EUENGAGE Automated Text Analysis Workshop, Amsterdam, 21-22 June 2016

Ongoing activities

With various groups of collaborators across Europe, we work on extending our research within the goals of Work Package 2, using the EUSpeech data. This work has been (and will be) presented at various conferences in Europe and the United States. Here a short list of selected forthcoming manuscripts

•    Errors have been made, others will be blamed: blame avoidance and blame-shifting in prime minister speeches during the economic crisis in Europe (Denise Traber, Martijn Schoonvelde & Gijs Schumacher)
•    Friends with text as data benefits: assessing and extending the use of automated text Analysis in political science and political psychology (Martijn Schoonvelde, Bert Bakker & Gijs Schumacher)
•    Undermining, obfuscating, or defending European integration? Public communication of European executives in times of EU politicization (Bart Bes, Martijn Schoonvelde & Christian Rauh)
•    Evaluating complexity in political speech (Anna Brosius, Bert Bakker, Martijn Schoonvelde & Gijs Schumacher)
•    Sentiment or topics? Applying the joint sentiment topic model to EU leader speeches (Max Boiten, Martijn Schoonvelde & Gijs Schumacher)