Text sentiment as a factor of electronic petition success (on the data collected from change.org)

Abstract

The article presents the results of a sentiment analysis of Russianlanguage electronic petitions from the international online platform Change.org. The empirical base of the study is 22450 petitions in Russian posted on the online resource Change.org (2012Change.org ( -2016. In the article the sentiment of popular and victorious petitions is being compared. The researchers have previously employed sentiment analysis of English and French electronic petitions, which has shown the success of the petition to be associated with the vocabulary that has a positive connotation. This study proves that the modern context of Russian 91 political relations requires a more sophisticated approach while selecting the sentiment for a certain text. It has been suggested that a complex linguistic strategy for discovering electronic petition text sentiment is due to the extralinguistic context as well as social and political reasons. A comparative sentiment analysis of popular and victorious petitions on the material of the Russian segment of the nongovernmental Internet resource Change.org revealed a communicative conflict between Internet users and representatives of political and business elites (addressees of petitions). The communicative conflict is manifested in the orientation of representatives of power and business towards a positive sentiment of petitions text, and in the orientation of Internet users towards a pronounced emotionality and negative sentiment of petitions text. This communicative conflict reveals the connections of sentiment and public actions typical of a communicative culture of Russian society.