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To follow the analysis conducted yesteday on MumsNet, we are going to analyse the views of football fans by visiting some of the more popular teams, who have discussion forums with a large number of comments on the election.
To start off, we are analysing the views of Liverpool football fans from a popular Liverpool fansite Red and White Kop. The culture of this football club (like many) is socialist and therefore we can expect a bias towards Labour from the traditional supporters of this football club.
To begin with then let's look at the views of Labour and what words are in context to Labour in the online comments. The figure below shows the words that are found in context with Labour. The closer the word is to the centre (i.e. the closer to the word Labour) then the closer the word is in context.
It is interesting to note that there are not many positive words coming through this analysis. The closest words in context are the other parties which means that discussions of Labour are also bringing in mention of the other parties. There is discussion of a hung parliament plus negative words such as 'bad', 'years'. There are also positive words such as 'win' and 'majority' but the discussion here is largely neutral.
The analysis of Liberal Democrats is shown in the figure below. Again the concept of hung parliament comes through strongly, as does 'win' and other positive words such as 'support', 'genuine', 'alternative', 'agree', 'authoritative', and 'knowledgeable'. In general the words found in context with the Liberal Democrats are positive with not many negative words or concepts coming through strongly.
This is in contrast to the Conservatives, where we see a number of strongly negative words coming through, as can be seen in the figure below. This is to be expected given the demographic of the website.
We will continue this analysis by looking at the views of football fans from other demographics and examine the difference in opinion and popularity for the parties and the leaders that we find.
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For this piece of analysis, we will focus on data taken from MumsNet.com, a website especially for parents, put together by parents. The demographic of the users is overwhelmingly female.
They have also been running their own polls, which you can view here.
The first piece of analysis focuses on Nick Clegg, who according to the poll is the overwhelming favourite from this site. As you would expect, the word 'best' can be found close in context to Nick Clegg, with Cameron also coming close. Other interesting words coming through in context with Nick Clegg are 'well', 'good', 'won' and 'interesting'.
We can follow this analysis up with the same contextual analysis on David Cameron. Here we see a number of rather negative words such as 'nervous', 'second', 'insincere', 'disdain', 'pants', 'slimy'. However there are a number of surprisingly positive words such as 'shag' and 'marry', which are perhaps out of place in a political debate.
Finally, we can look at the analysis of Gordon Brown. We also see the word 'second' coming through in context with Brown, as well as a number of positive words such as 'relaxed', 'winning', 'surprisingly', 'agree', 'strong'. There are negative words in there too, such as 'rebuttals', 'preached', 'bums', 'terrible' and 'tied'. We also see 'Blair' coming through in context with Gordon Brown - whether this is positive or negative will depend on how Blair is perceived in the electorate these days.
We will continue this analysis in the days running up to the election.
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Previous analysis looked at the comments made on the BBC's Have your say discussion forums. For this piece of analysis we will instead use all of the comments made on blog posts on the Daily Telegraph website in the month of April. The analysis of the previous two blog postings will be repeated, so we will show what policy areas are close in context firstly to the party leaders, and then to the political parties themselves. This blog post will focus on the political parties.
As before it is important to note that the scores are normalised to allow a comparison between parties to be made more easily. Also the sentiment analysis of each of the policy areas here is not shown, but simply shows what policy areas are discussed in context with the leader/party.
For the analysis shown here, the chart below shows the three parties and the respective score in each policy area.
Again it is noticeable that the Liberal Democrats do not score very well in most of the categories, implying that there is not much discussion of their policies in these areas. This is a real problem for them since to be taken seriously as an alternative party what they stand for on the whole range of policy issues needs to be communicated effectively to the electorate.
We will be continuing this analysis by analysing blog and online comments from other data sources in the coming days.
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Previous analysis looked at the comments made on the BBC's Have your say discussion forums. For this piece of analysis we will instead use all of the comments made on blog posts on the Daily Telegraph website in the month of April. The analysis of the previous two blog postings will be repeated, so we will show what policy areas are close in context firstly to the party leaders, and then to the political parties themselves. This blog post will focus on the party leaders.
As before it is important to note that the scores are normalised to allow a comparison between leaders to be make more easily. Also the sentiment analysis of each of the policy areas here is not shown, but simply shows what policy areas are discussed in context with the leader/party.
The chart below shows the analysis from the Daily Telegraph where we see that immigration and Europe are discussed much more frequently than in the data from the BBC.
The analysis of Gordon Brown is shown below, where again immigration is a top issue. In contrast with David Cameron however, the economy comes through as a strong policy area.
Finally for the three leaders, let's look at Nick Clegg. It is noticeable that Nick Clegg does not have as many categories as the other two leaders, and again immigration is a strong issue. This probably reflects the importance of the issue to the readers of the Daily Telegraph more than the party leaders themselves.
We can compare the leaders against each other with reference to the chart below. It is interesting to note the areas where each leader has most comments. Notice again that this does not mean that they are good or bad comments - the sentiment analysis of the comments made is not the focus of this particular report.
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In the previous blog post we examined how close in context each party leader was to the various policy themes in the election. This time we have repeated the analysis but instead focused on the political parties themselves (and therefore not exclusively on the party leaders).
As before, this data came from every single comment from every single discussion topic made on the BBC Have your say discussion forum in the month of April.
To begin with, let's look at the analysis for the Liberal Democrats. In the chart below you can see the analysis undertaken which shows a slightly different picture to that of Nick Clegg. As you can see, immigration is now no longer the top discussion topic for the Liberals, and perhaps shows the influence of their widely respected Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable, as we see the topic of taxation being the number one discussed topic for the Liberals.
The chart shows that immigration is still an important issue, with equality and Europe also coming through strongly.
Now let's look at the Conservatives. Again similar to David Cameron we see the economy at the number one issue with defence also coming through very strongly. Unlike David Cameron however, we can see that there are fewer conversations relating to topics like education, health and corruption. Again it is worth emphasising that this analysis does not show the underlying sentiment for this topics, simply that these areas have been a focus for discussion for the electorate.
Finally, let's examine the scores for the Labour party. Here the analysis again shows a majority focus on the economy and taxation. It is worth noting that it is possible that the other areas such as health and education could have been discussed just as often as the Conservatives but that the number of discussions on the economy in context with Labour have reduced their relative importance for these figures.
This analysis begs the question for the Labour party, is their message being buried beneath the focus on the economy? Are their other policy areas being sufficiently communicated to the public, or is the focus on the economy instead reflecting the mood of the electorate, and what they are mostly concerned or angry about?
For the Liberals, it also begs the question - is the focus on Nick Clegg diluting the policy messages of their party? Or is this to be expected given that this is the first time for some time that a third party is being seriously considered by the media? Perhaps they should be comforted by the fact that their policies are being discussed and broadly speaking are at similar levels to the other parties - this may indicate that they are indeed being taken seriously by the electorate.
For Labour, is it a worry that there is quite so much focus on the economy? Is this a strength or a weakness for them? As often with these types of questions, it is probably a bit of both - but if the electorate holds them to blame for the economic woes the country has been experiencing then this may explain the inability of Brown to shift the opinion polls in his favour.
We will look to examine this in more detail in the coming days in the run up to the election.
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The previous analysis showed where the public had concentrated their comments when discussing on the BBC Have your say discussion forums for the month of April. We decided to take this analysis further, and look at how the policy areas relate against each party leader. As before, this data came from every single comment from every single discussion topic made on the BBC Have your say discussion forum in the month of April.
This analysis was conducted by comparing the policy areas in context against the party leaders, to see the distribution of conversations for each leader in the various policy areas. The score is normalised for each party leader to make the comparison of the relative importance for each leader easier.
First of all, let's look at the analysis of Gordon Brown. As expected, the economy and tax head the agenda and also the comments that have been written online. The only surprise may be in the fact that health and schools come out so low in comparison.
The next analysis we will look at is David Cameron. This analysis shows in some respect a much more healthy overview of discussion against policy area, with the scores not being dominated by the economy and taxation. The chart shows that there is a equal spread of discussion over a range of topics. However, this may simply reflect the fact that there has been so much discussion on the economy with Gordon Brown, for obvious reasons.
The final phase of analysis is to look at Nick Clegg. Here we see that in contrast to the other two party leaders, immigration comes out as the top issue. This perhaps reflects the attacks on liberal democrat policy that were made recently by both the Conservatives and the Tories, and on the basis of this analysis show that this has resulted in more comments on this issue in context with Nick Clegg than any other issue.
It can also be seen that there are fewer policy areas that gather scores for Nick Clegg when compared with the other parties. This is likely to be due to the fact that as the third party in the election, and a somewhat surprise package to many people, the discussions on Nick Clegg have not focussed exclusively on policy areas, but rather on personal qualities.
It should be noted that these charts do not show sentiment analysis regarding these policy areas - therefore although it is clear that Gordon Brown has an overwhelming majority of comments relating to the economy, this does not mean that they are either mostly positive, or mostly negative. This analysis simply shows the areas that have been discussed.
The next blog will examine how the parties profile looks, particularly when we compare this against the party leaders.
We will continue this analysis and any changes that occur in public opinion in the coming days in the run up to the election.
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Our new analysis focusses on the importance of policy areas to the electorate. For this analysis we have downloaded and analysed every comment made on every separate discussion thread on the BBC Have your say discussion forums for the month of April. We have then created a score based on the contextual analysis of the various policy areas to see which areas have been discussed the most.
Notice that this analysis is therefore not unbiased, since the public are not free to create new discussion threads. However the threads that discuss the television debates are more wide ranging and give the opportunity for the public to discuss any areas that they feel were not covered elsewhere.
It is unsurprising, when reviewing the results, to see tax and the economy at the top of the public's priorities. Europe and business follow closely behind which are obviously also linked to the current economic climate.
The next issues to come through are education and schools, which are obviously the same topic.
Rather surprisingly, given the amount of attention it has received during this election campaign, immigration does not score so highly, perhaps suggesting that the electorate are not impressed by the squabbles between the party leaders on this topic and that the economy and the future job prospects for most people concern them more.
Corruption also scores quite low, which is again surprising given the earlier scandal around MPs expenses. However this perhaps shows that the electorate has moved past this issue and are more interested in the difference that the politicians can make for them, and that this particular topic is not going to dominate the election as some had previously feared.
We will continue this analysis in the coming days to examine whether there is a shift in public opinion in these areas.
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