European newspapers articles:pro and anti democratic leaders represented in traditional media (updated)

European Political Leaders Media Corpus (2022–2025)

Description

This dataset contains a structured corpus of 26,187 newspaper articles focusing on the media representation of European political leaders across multiple national contexts. The dataset is designed to support the analysis of political discourse, leadership framing, and ideological positioning in European media systems, particularly in relation to election periods and major political transitions.

The corpus includes articles from mainstream centrist/liberal and conservative media outlets in the following countries:

France

Germany

Hungary

Italy

Poland

Sweden

The data spans the period 2022–2025, with a focus on politically salient time windows, including:

·         National and European elections

·         Leadership transitions

·         Major geopolitical developments (e.g., Trump inauguration)

Data Collection and structure

Articles were collected via automated web scraping using keyword-based queries related to:

Political leaders

Elections

Government and political developments

Data collection was conducted within predefined time windows, tailored to each country’s electoral and political calendar.

The dataset is provided in structured format and includes the following variables:

·         article_url — Article URL

·         Title_eng — Title (translated into English)

·         date — Publication date

·         Section_eng — Article section (translated)

·         time_slot — Internal time window identifier

·         site — Media outlet

·         Language — Original language

·         Country — Country of publication

·         Orientation — Political orientation of the outlet

·         Time_period — Full descriptive time period label

·         Period — Simplified time period category  

·         num_wds — Total word count

·         uniq_wds — Number of unique words

The dataset enables the study of:

·         Media representations of political leaders

·         Ideological framing across outlets and countries

·         Election-related discourse dynamics

·         Cross-national variations in political communication

·         Linguistic complexity and textual features

Preprocessing

Articles were cleaned and structured into a tabular format

Titles and sections were translated into English

Word counts (num_wds) and lexical diversity (uniq_wds) were computed

Time periods were standardized across countries

Limitations

The dataset reflects selected media outlets and is not fully representative of national media systems. Some metadata fields (e.g., date, section) may contain missing values Automated translation may introduce minor inaccuracies.

Ethical Considerations

The dataset is intended for research purposes only. Users must comply with applicable copyright regulations. No personal or sensitive data was intentionally collected