  In developed nations assassinations are rare and thus the impact of such acts
on the electoral and political landscape is understudied. In this paper, we
focus on Twitter data to examine the effects of Japan's former Primer Minister
Abe's assassination on the Japanese House of Councillors elections in 2022. We
utilize sentiment analysis and emotion detection together with topic modeling
on over 2 million tweets and compare them against tweets during previous
election cycles. Our findings indicate that Twitter sentiments were negatively
impacted by the event in the short term and that social media attention span
has shortened. We also discuss how "necropolitics" affected the outcome of the
elections in favor of the deceased's party meaning that there seems to have
been an effect of Abe's death on the election outcome though the findings
warrant further investigation for conclusive results.
