In this paper, we explore the use of emotions in the Portuguese political parties' (with a seat in the Portuguese Parliament) communication as expressed by their official Twitter accounts, as of March 2020. The chosen period of our investigation is particularly interesting because political parties had a chance to communicate their views during a pandemic situation and over a period of one year. These views include possible solutions to face the crisis and their comments on the development of the whole situation. Using a standard lexicon we classified the amount of particular emotions in different tweets. Using this method we plotted the average positivity and negativity along time per party. We also analyzed the impact of each emotion to classify positivity using the present corpus. Finally, we considered some important words regarding the pandemic and their average positivity score. The analysis allows us to identify different approaches to participation in social media according to different strategies, more than political ideology.

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Political communication,Portuguese political parties,Portuguese parliament,Portuguese,Lexicon,Sentiment analysis,Emotions,Visualization,Social media,Twitter,Covid-19

• Computer and Information Sciences - Natural Sciences

This publication is an output of the following project(s):

• Alternative Shaper
• Impact of Blockchains and Decentralised Ledger Technologies