# The Effects of Political Martyrdom on Election Results: The Assassination of Abe

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18004/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Public sentiment analysis and topic modeling regarding COVID-19 vaccines on the Reddit social media platform: A call to action for strengthening vaccine confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13293/) (2021)
- [fugashi, a Tool for Tokenizing Japanese in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06858/) (2020)
- [Frustratingly Easy Sentiment Analysis of Text Streams: Generating High-Quality Emotion Arcs Using Emotion Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07381/) (2022)
- [Election campaigning on social media: Politicians, audiences and the mediation of political communication on Facebook and Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08825/) (2018)
- [A Comparison of Online Hate on Reddit and 4chan: A Case Study of the 2020 US Election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01302/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In developed nations assassinations are rare and thus the impact of such acts on the electoral and political landscape is understudied. In this paper, we focus on Twitter data to examine the effects of Japan's former Primer Minister Abe's assassination on the Japanese House of Councillors elections in 2022. We utilize sentiment analysis and emotion detection together with topic modeling on over 2 million tweets and compare them against tweets during previous election cycles. Our findings indicate that Twitter sentiments were negatively impacted by the event in the short term and that social media attention span has shortened. We also discuss how "necropolitics" affected the outcome of the elections in favor of the deceased's party meaning that there seems to have been an effect of Abe's death on the election outcome though the findings warrant further investigation for conclusive results.