EP Elections 2019: Emotions, Polarisation and Populism

This paper is based on a study of EU-27 countries social media discussions in May 2019. Through a novel methodology and based on a thorough investigation with partners from European countries, this paper reveals what were the polarising and hyped themes when discussing the European parliament elections across Europe, which topics resonated in different parts of the EU, and what have emotions got to do with it. We particularly look at the Eurosceptic and populist parties around Europe, and explore the Strache #ibizagate phenomena, and its resonance and potential effect on the elections. The project employed AI assisted analysis, topic modelling on big data from Twitter or Facebook, with country specific knowledge and discourse analysis of emotional language. The data has been collected in 2019 in an Academy of Finland funded research project, and at this stage we are presenting the main results of the European parliament elections database. While the platforms differ and have their affordances and the datasets are slightly different, we have sought to make the datasets compatible with comparative research. The data is drawn on local hashtags and keywords, as well as Europe-wide hash tags for Twitter, and through country specific knowledge on Facebook. Both the national and Europe level results will be made available to demonstrate what were the hyped and the polarised points, and emotional language, and how Euroscepticism played out in the social media debates in these elections.