AusPolStats 2020 Year in Review

With 2020 closed (and thank God!) we wanted to review the year that was through the eyes of AusPolStats.

In 2020 we analysed 71,205 articles from 1669 sources related to Australian politics. This compared to 82,677 articles in the election year of 2019. We have now analysed and indexed just under 200,000 Australian politics articles since 2018.

In this post we will examine some of the high level trends observed through the year.

Split of Coverage Between Parties

Party coverage was found to be relatively stable throughout 2020. Coalition MPs were linked to ~75% of articles throughout the year as seen in the graph below. Coalition coverage was highest in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in March and April.

Comparing to the election year of 2019 we found that coverage was more focussed on Coalition MPs. This was calculated by comparing the proportions of coverage between parties in 2019 to that of 2020.

Proportion of Negative Coverage

In 2020 we used some of our lockdown hours developing BARNABY; AusPolStats language sentiment model trained specifically to classify Australian political news headlines. You can learn more about BARNABY here. BARNABY allows us to classify articles as positive, negative or factual.

We have used BARNABY to track the proportion of negative articles that are linked to MPs from each party. The graph below shows these party trends through 2020. It is noted that the proportion of negative press for the greens fluctuates more than the other parties. This is likely driven by a smaller sample of articles.

We also compared negativity of coverage in 2020 against 2019. It was observed that the numbers were quite stable when taken on a year by year basis. The largest change from year to year was for Labor. 9% more of their articles were classified as negative in 2020 compared to 2019.

Thanks for your support through 2020, and we are looking forward to bringing you further Australian political statistics in 2021.