Analyzing sentiments towards E-Levy policy implementation in Ghana using twitter data

Abstract

Abstract A newly proposed or implemented government policy often encounters challenges. Ghanaian citizens have always look down negatively upon their government's policies, hence those are rarely appreciated. This paper ponders over the Ghanaian government's proposal of electronic levy on mobile money transactions which was announced in the 2022 budget on November 17, 2021. We have scrutinized this governmental policy through the ordinary citizen's perspective using lexicon-based sentiment analysis on Twitter data. Lexicons are collections of words that express specific emotions, and deals with interpreting emotions like happiness, frustration, anger, and sadness. Twitter, serving as a means for people to share their views, provides enormous user generated content, beneficial for research purposes. We collected e-levy specific Twitter data in five phases, namely; policy introduction, popularity, discussion, feeble, and debate phases. The policy introduction phase recorded the least volume of data containing 1400 tweets, among which our sentiment analyzer classifies 8.93% as positive, 89.29% as neutral, and 1.78% as negative. The debate phase recorded the highest amount of data containing 18.423 tweets, among which 24.43% tweets are classified as positive, 59.29% as neutral, and 16.28% as negative. An analysis on the entire data containing 38,771 tweets reports 25.50% positive, 59.02% neutral, and 15.48% negative tweets. Our study determines that people are not largely unhappy established by the stable positive sentiment percentage, however, there is a high neutral score in all the phases.