Narrowband Influencers and Global Icons: Universality and Media Compatibility in the Communication Patterns of Political Leaders Worldwide

Abstract

This article analyzes how political leaders communicate with their target audiences and examines whether they adopt a country-specific communication persona, or react to the global media-intensive environment by offering more universal communication. Politicians communicate through presentational (e.g., social media) and representational (e.g., press) outlets, and the compatibility between these outlets represents the leader’s effectiveness in transmitting the desired messages to the audience. The authors of this study suggest a theoretical framework that classifies public figures’ communication along two dimensions: universality (particular–universal) and media compatibility (low–high). The authors used language processing tools to study the sentiment, topic mixture, and use of pronouns by 61 global world leaders in more than 300,000 messages from the leaders’ Twitter accounts and press articles. The results show a high level of universality across political leaders in sentiment, topic mixture, and pronoun usage. The media compatibility is high, with Twitter being slightly more positive. Most leaders fall within the categories of Cosmopolitan Antagonist (high universality, low media compatibility) and Global Icon (high universality, high media compatibility). Overall, the sentiment of their communications is positive. Popular topics include diplomacy, economy, corruption, and the Arab world. No significant relationship was found between the sentiment or communication topics and country characteristics.

Analizing Teens an Analysis from the Perspective of Gamers in Youtube

“…The results of the polarity show some inherent and typical features of the new digital culture. The high rates of positivity together with the significant levels of subjectivity identified are related to the sweetened vision of the world highlighted in previous research [46][47][48], especially in content focusing on everyday life, travel, and games [49]. This study's results are consistent with such research.…”

“…Third, the obvious theatricality of the gamers, their use of humor and the jargon of digital culture lead to uniformity in its contents [23,44,45]. In terms of coherence, it is common to find an idealized vision based on a high degree of positivity and subjectivity in the polarity of feelings [46][47][48], although Ferchaud [19] suggests, in the case of video games, that the positivity rate is quite balanced between positivity, negativity, and neutrality. Contents with themes such as body image, self-expression, travel, digital culture, and 'startups' (emerging companies) are associated with positivity, those related to depression, loneliness, and real-world relationships have negative polarity, and those with their own identity and anxiety are neutral [49].…”

A systematic review of the use of topic models for short text social media analysis

“…A manual inspection for specificity was conducted by manual inspection of topics at each value of K (Xu and Zhou 2020 ; Peres et al. 2020 ; El-Bassel et al. 2021 ; ).…”

Editorial: Vision for JIM and First Issue of 2020

“…The following two articles empirically address cutting-edge phenomena from the perspective of international marketing, exemplifying my goal of encouraging work that pushes boundaries. In their article, "Narrowband Influencers and Global Icons: Universality and Media Compatibility in the Communication Patterns of Political Leaders Worldwide," Peres et al (2020) tackle the timely issue of communication strategies of global political leaders and examine the universality of the communications approaches of over 60 world leaders across both social and traditional media. Felipe Thomaz's (2020) article, "The Digital and Physical Footprints of Dark Net Markets," focuses on the understudied yet increasingly prevalent issue of the operation of black markets and criminal activity on the web.…”