National leaders’ Twitter speech to infer political leaning and election results in 2015 Venezuelan parliamentary elections

Abstract:

The large adoption of Twitter during electioneering has created a valuable opportunity to monitor political deliberation nationwide. Recent work has analyzed online attention to forecast elections results addressing some limitations of opinion polling. However, the reproducibility of such methods remains a challenge given that most of them rely on the number of political parties or candidates mentions. In this study, we propose a method to infer citizens' political alignment in order to pbkp_redict elections results. To this end, first we collect 750K tweets posted during 2015 Venezuelan Parliamentary election either inside the Venezuela's bounding box or by its political leaders. Second, we build a dictionary characterizing the political leader's speech applying automated content analysis to our corpus. We show that the automatically generated dictionary is an useful tool to improve the accuracy on political election results …

Año de publicación:

2017

Keywords:

Fuente:

google