The Effects of Political Martyrdom on Election Results: The Assassination of Abe
Miu Nicole Takagi
TL;DR
The paper investigates whether the assassination of Shinzo Abe influenced the 2022 Japanese House of Councillors election by analyzing over 2 million Japanese-language tweets collected in an 18-day window prior to the vote. It combines sentiment analysis with a BERT-based classifier, Plutchik emotion detection, and LDA topic modeling to track shifts in sentiment, emotions, and topics, comparing 2022 to prior elections. The findings indicate a short-term negative dip in election-related sentiment and a noticeably shortened social-media attention span, with only tentative evidence for lasting electoral impact and necropolitics-like effects. The work contributes to understanding political martyrdom and online information dynamics in elections, while highlighting limitations in linking social-media signals to actual voting behavior and outcomes.
Abstract
In developed nations assassinations are rare and thus the impact of such acts on the electoral and political landscape is understudied. In this paper, we focus on Twitter data to examine the effects of Japan's former Primer Minister Abe's assassination on the Japanese House of Councillors elections in 2022. We utilize sentiment analysis and emotion detection together with topic modeling on over 2 million tweets and compare them against tweets during previous election cycles. Our findings indicate that Twitter sentiments were negatively impacted by the event in the short term and that social media attention span has shortened. We also discuss how "necropolitics" affected the outcome of the elections in favor of the deceased's party meaning that there seems to have been an effect of Abe's death on the election outcome though the findings warrant further investigation for conclusive results.