Every tweet counts? How sentiment analysis of social media can improve our knowledge of citizens’ political preferences with an application to Italy and France

The growing usage of social media by a wider audience of citizens sharply increases the possibility of investigating the web as a device to explore and track political preferences. In the present paper we apply a method recently proposed by other social scientists to three different scenarios, by analyzing on one side the online popularity of Italian political leaders throughout 2011, and on the other the voting intention of French Internet users in both the 2012 presidential ballot and the subsequent legislative election. While Internet users are not necessarily representative of the whole population of a country’s citizens, our analysis shows a remarkable ability for social media to forecast electoral results, as well as a noteworthy correlation between social media and the results of traditional mass surveys. We also illustrate that the predictive ability of social media analysis strengthens as the number of citizens expressing their opinion online increases, provided that the citizens act consistently on these opinions.

[1]  D. Hindman,et al.  Does the Digital Divide Matter More? Comparing the Effects of New Media and Old Media Use on the Education-Based Knowledge Gap , 2011 .

[2]  Daniel Gayo-Avello,et al.  Don't turn social media into another 'Literary Digest' poll , 2011, Commun. ACM.

[3]  Evgeny V. Morozov,et al.  Iran: Downside to the "Twitter Revolution" , 2009 .

[4]  E. Noelle-Neumann.  The Spiral of Silence A Theory of Public Opinion , 1974 .

[5]  Stephen Ansolabehere,et al.  The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections: An Analysis of State and Federal Offices, 1942–2000 , 2002 .

[6]  W. Bennett,et al.  Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action: Using Twitter to Explore the Ecologies of Two Climate Change Protests , 2011 .

[7]  Zizi Papacharissi.  The virtual sphere , 2002, New Media Soc..

[8]  Michael Boss.  Economic theory of democracy , 1974 .

[9]  M. Hindman.  The Myth of Digital Democracy , 2008 .

[10]  Irving Crespi,et al.  Pre-Election Polling: Sources of Accuracy and Error , 1990 .

[11]  Stefano M. Iacus,et al.  Measuring Idiosyncratic Happiness Through the Analysis of Twitter: An Application to the Italian Case , 2015 .

[12]  Mark Thompson,et al.  Mapping Digital Media , 2012 .

[13]  W. Bennett,et al.  DIGITAL MEDIA AND THE PERSONALIZATION OF COLLECTIVE ACTION , 2011 .

[14]  Brendan T. O'Connor,et al.  From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series , 2010, ICWSM.

[15]  Gary King,et al.  A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science , 2010 .

[16]  Natalie Fenton,et al.  New Media, Counter Publicity and the Public Sphere , 2003, New Media Soc..

[17]  Karen Cortell Reisman.  "The art of asking questions". , 2008, Texas dental journal.

[18]  Isabell M. Welpe,et al.  Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment , 2010, ICWSM.

[19]  Margaret E. Roberts,et al.  How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression , 2013, American Political Science Review.

[20]  Christine B. Williams,et al.  What is a Social Network Worth? Facebook and Vote Share in the 2008 Presidential Primaries , 2008 .

[21]  Lauren Langman,et al.  From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements* , 2005 .

[22]  Michael S Lewis-Beck,et al.  Proxy models for election forecasting: The 2012 French test , 2012 .

[23]  J. Meek,et al.  Facebook, social integration and informal learning at university: ‘It is more for socialising and talking to friends about work than for actually doing work’ , 2009 .

[24]  JungherrAndreas,et al.  Why the Pirate Party Won the German Election of 2009 or The Trouble With Predictions , 2012 .

[25]  Fabio Franch.  (Wisdom of the Crowds)2: 2010 UK Election Prediction with Social Media , 2013 .

[26]  Eni Mustafaraj,et al.  From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search , 2010 .

[27]  Bernard J. Jansen,et al.  Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth , 2009, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[28]  Panagiotis Takis Metaxas,et al.  Vocal Minority Versus Silent Majority: Discovering the Opionions of the Long Tail , 2011, 2011 IEEE Third Int'l Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2011 IEEE Third Int'l Conference on Social Computing.

[29]  Y. Benkler,et al.  The Wealth of Networks , 2008 .

[30]  Sergio Splendore,et al.  Mapping Digital Media: Italy , 2011 .

[31]  S. Albrecht,et al.  Weblog Campaigning in the German Bundestag Election 2005 , 2007 .

[32]  Detlef Schoder,et al.  Web Science 2.0: Identifying Trends through Semantic Social Network Analysis , 2008, 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.

[33]  Samuel J. Best,et al.  Analyzing the representativeness of internet political participation , 2005 .

[34]  Johan Bos,et al.  Predicting the 2011 Dutch Senate Election Results with Twitter , 2012 .

[35]  Anders Olof Larsson,et al.  Studying political microblogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign , 2012, New Media Soc..

[36]  Deva R. Woodly,et al.  New competencies in democratic communication? Blogs, agenda setting and political participation , 2007 .

[37]  Heather Savigny,et al.  Public Opinion, Political Communication and the Internet , 2002 .

[38]  Gary W. Cox,et al.  Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems , 1997 .

[39]  H. Jansen,et al.  Pundits, Ideologues, and the Ranters: The British Columbia Election Online , 2006 .

[40]  Eni Mustafaraj,et al.  Can Collective Sentiment Expressed on Twitter Predict Political Elections? , 2011, AAAI.

[41]  Simon Cottle.  Media and the Arab uprisings of 2011: Research notes , 2011 .

[42]  G. Katona,et al.  The Art of Asking Questions , 1951 .

[43]  Hernando Rojas,et al.  Weblogs, traditional sources online and political participation: an assessment of how the internet is changing the political environment , 2009, New Media Soc..

[44]  Gayo-AvelloDaniel.  Don't turn social media into another 'Literary Digest' poll , 2011 .

[45]  Claes H. de Vreese,et al.  Good News for the Future? Young People, Internet Use, and Political Participation , 2011, Commun. Res..

[46]  A. Ceron.  FromWords to facts : Wordfish, a modern technique to estimate policy positions of political actors , 2011 .

[47]  R. Michael Alvarez,et al.  Electronic elections - the perils and promises of digital democracy , 2008 .