The Effects of Political Martyrdom on Election Results: The Assassination of Abe
This addresses a gap in understanding how rare political assassinations affect elections in developed nations, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new case.
The paper investigated the impact of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe's assassination on the 2022 House of Councillors elections using Twitter data, finding that Twitter sentiments were negatively affected in the short term and that the event may have influenced election outcomes in favor of Abe's party, though results are not conclusive.
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.