One year of European premiers leadership and empathy in times of global pandemic: a Twitter sentiment analysis

Abstract

After over a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we observe very different health and economic outcomes across countries. Has this also been the case for the communication of their leaders? Has the communication of the political leaders of most affected countries shown higher levels of sentiment? This study uses Twitter to test whether a sample of European leaders exhibited empathy in their unmediated communications, as advocated by neo-charismatic leadership theories. We find that leaders do show emotions in their communications. However, there are no significant differences between them, leading us to reject the hypothesis that leaders of the most affected countries displayed more empathy than those of the least affected.

Keywords

• Political leadership
• empathy
• European premiers
• political Twitter analysis
• emotions