Politics as Usual
ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis
ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis
Peaks and persistence: modeling the shape of microblog conversations
Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Don't turn social media into another 'Literary Digest' poll
Communications of the ACM
Election Forecasts With Twitter: How 140 Characters Reflect the Political Landscape
Social Science Computer Review
No, You Cannot Predict Elections with Twitter
IEEE Internet Computing
PLEAD 2013: politics, elections and data
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Conference on information & knowledge management
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As the microblogging service Twitter becomes an increasingly popular tool for politicians and general users to comment on and discuss politics, researchers increasingly turn to the relationship between tweets mentioning parties or candidates and their respective electoral fortunes. This paper offers a detailed analysis of Twitter messages posted during the run-up to the 2009 federal election in Germany and their relationship to the electoral fortunes of Germany's parties and candidates. This analysis will focus on four metrics for measuring the attention on parties and candidates on Twitter and the relationship to their respective vote share. The metrics discussed here are: the total number of hashtags mentioning a given political party; the dynamics between explicitly positive or explicitly negative mentions of a given political party; the total number of hashtags mentioning one of the leading candidates, Angela Merkel (CDU) or Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD); and the total number of users who used hashtags mentioning a given party or candidate. The results will show that during the campaign of 2009 Twitter messages commenting on parties and candidates showed little, if any, systematic relationship with subsequent votes on election day. In the discussion of the results, I will raise a number of issues that researchers interested in predicting elections with Twitter will have to address to advance the state of the literature.