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A multi-level geographical study of Italian political elections from Twitter Data

Caldarelli, Guido and Chessa, Alessandro and Pammolli, Fabio and Pompa, Gabriele and Puliga, Michelangelo and Riccaboni, Massimo and Riotta, Gianni A multi-level geographical study of Italian political elections from Twitter Data. PloS One, 9 (5). e95809. ISSN 1932-6203 (2014)

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Abstract

In this paper we present an analysis of the behavior of Italian Twitter users during national political elections. We monitor the volumes of the tweets related to the leaders of the various political parties and we compare them to the elections results. Furthermore, we study the topics that are associated with the co-occurrence of two politicians in the same tweet. We cannot conclude, from a simple statistical analysis of tweet volume and their time evolution, that it is possible to precisely predict the election outcome (or at least not in our case of study that was characterized by a “too-close-to-call” scenario). On the other hand, we found that the volume of tweets and their change in time provide a very good proxy of the final results. We present this analysis both at a national level and at smaller levels, ranging from the regions composing the country to macro-areas (North, Center, South).

Item Type: Article
Identification Number: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095809
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
J Political Science > JC Political theory
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Research Area: Economics and Institutional Change
Depositing User: Ms T. Iannizzi
Date Deposited: 13 May 2014 09:07
Last Modified: 07 Jul 2014 10:27
URI: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/id/eprint/2196

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