Affective Signals and Issue Salience in Swiss Reddit Discourse: Insights on Public Reaction to Government Measures During COVID-19 and the Ukraine Crisis

This study explores the interplay of issue salience and affective signals in Swiss public reactions to government measures on the Reddit forum r/Switzerland during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. Using an Exploratory Data Analysis approach, this study applied topic modeling (BERTopic) to a large corpus of posts (2019-2022) to identify shifts in online public attention and emotional responses, and transformer-based sentiment and emotion analysis to quantify sentimentand discrete emotions as affectives. The results reveal a Swiss online public that is highly responsive to events, with attention shifting rapidly, and whose discourse is deeply imbued with emotional content, predominantly negative in the face of restrictive policies or unsettling international developments. These insights underscore the value of computational social science in unpacking the complexities of online public opinion and offer a foundation for future research into the evolving nature of digital democracy and crisis governance.