More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior
Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2013 papers
Abstract
Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district's racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media.
Related Papers
- → Support for the euro, political knowledge, and voting behavior in the 2001 and 2005 UK general elections(2012)24 cited
- → Voting and Values: Reciprocal Effects over Time(2013)53 cited
- → Media exposure and the engaged citizen: How the media shape political participation(2014)43 cited
- It's the Bribe, Stupid! Pocketbook vs. Sociotropic Corruption Voting(2011)
- The influence of social identity theory on voting behavior in the FIFA Ballon d’Or competition(2014)