The Face of Populism: Examining Differences in Facial Emotional
Expressions of Political Leaders Using Machine Learning
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09914v3
- Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2024 14:44:49 GMT
- Title: The Face of Populism: Examining Differences in Facial Emotional
Expressions of Political Leaders Using Machine Learning
- Authors: Sara Major, Aleksandar Toma\v{s}evi\'c
- Abstract summary: We apply a deep-learning-based computer-vision algorithm to a sample of 220 YouTube videos depicting political leaders from 15 different countries.
We observe statistically significant differences in the average score of expressed negative emotions between groups of leaders with varying degrees of populist rhetoric.
- Score: 57.70351255180495
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Online media has revolutionized the way political information is disseminated
and consumed on a global scale, and this shift has compelled political figures
to adopt new strategies of capturing and retaining voter attention. These
strategies often rely on emotional persuasion and appeal, and as visual content
becomes increasingly prevalent in virtual space, much of political
communication too has come to be marked by evocative video content and imagery.
The present paper offers a novel approach to analyzing material of this kind.
We apply a deep-learning-based computer-vision algorithm to a sample of 220
YouTube videos depicting political leaders from 15 different countries, which
is based on an existing trained convolutional neural network architecture
provided by the Python library fer. The algorithm returns emotion scores
representing the relative presence of 6 emotional states (anger, disgust, fear,
happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral expression for each frame of
the processed YouTube video. We observe statistically significant differences
in the average score of expressed negative emotions between groups of leaders
with varying degrees of populist rhetoric as defined by the Global Party Survey
(GPS), indicating that populist leaders tend to express negative emotions to a
greater extent during their public performance than their non-populist
counterparts. Overall, our contribution provides insight into the
characteristics of visual self-representation among political leaders, as well
as an open-source workflow for further computational studies of their
non-verbal communication.
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