Tweets and Votes: A Four-Country Comparison of Volumetric and Sentiment Analysis Approaches

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016): Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Volume

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016): Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Poster Papers

This study analyzes different methodological approaches followed in social media literature and their accuracy in predicting the general elections of four countries. Volumetric and unsupervised and supervised sentiment approaches are adopted for generating 12 metrics to compute predicted voteshares. The findings suggest that Twitter-based predictions can produce accurate results for elections, given the digital environment of a country. A cross-country analyses helps to evaluate the quality of predictions and the influence of different contexts, such as technological development and democratic setups. We recommend future scholars to combine volume, sentiment and network aspects of social media to model voting intentions in developing societies.

10.1609/icwsm.v10i1.14773