Who is for, who is against? A sentiment analysis of the new Russian constitution

In this paper attitudes and sentiment towards the new Russian constitution are analysed on the basis of 4,143 tweets, collected between March and May, 2020. In applying text mining techniques to the collected corpus, the focus is on factors explaining positive and negative attitudes toward the imminent constitutional reform, and detecting mixing factors like political similarities between Russia and some of the Western countries, and the relations between Russians and some Western governments. The evolution of attitudes in space and time is also investigated. The analysis shows that factors like (1) political orientation, (2) geography, (3) media type, (4) social network user type, and (5) political similarities between Russia and some Western countries were important to explain positive attitudes. Overall, the study suggests that tweeters supporting the reform are more likely to belong to one of the following categories: sympathizers or adherents of right-wing parties; Russian and former USSR nationals, and TV channels and social network addicted users, particularly those belonging to the “haters” category.