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Twitter-Based Analysis of the Dynamics of Collective Attention to Political Parties

Author

Listed:
  • Young-Ho Eom
  • Michelangelo Puliga
  • Jasmina Smailović
  • Igor Mozetič
  • Guido Caldarelli

Abstract

Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe complex phenomena in the real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is represented by the collective attention to the action of political parties. Not surprisingly, researchers and stakeholders tried to correlate parties' presence on social media with their performances in elections. Despite the many efforts, results are still inconclusive since this kind of data is often very noisy and significant signals could be covered by (largely unknown) statistical fluctuations. In this paper we consider the number of tweets (tweet volume) of a party as a proxy of collective attention to the party, identify the dynamics of the volume, and show that this quantity has some information on the election outcome. We find that the distribution of the tweet volume for each party follows a log-normal distribution with a positive autocorrelation of the volume over short terms, which indicates the volume has large fluctuations of the log-normal distribution yet with a short-term tendency. Furthermore, by measuring the ratio of two consecutive daily tweet volumes, we find that the evolution of the daily volume of a party can be described by means of a geometric Brownian motion (i.e., the logarithm of the volume moves randomly with a trend). Finally, we determine the optimal period of averaging tweet volume for reducing fluctuations and extracting short-term tendencies. We conclude that the tweet volume is a good indicator of parties' success in the elections when considered over an optimal time window. Our study identifies the statistical nature of collective attention to political issues and sheds light on how to model the dynamics of collective attention in social media.

Suggested Citation

  • Young-Ho Eom & Michelangelo Puliga & Jasmina Smailović & Igor Mozetič & Guido Caldarelli, 2015. "Twitter-Based Analysis of the Dynamics of Collective Attention to Political Parties," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(7), pages 1-17, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0131184
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131184
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Jim Giles, 2012. "Computational social science: Making the links," Nature, Nature, vol. 488(7412), pages 448-450, August.
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    Cited by:

    1. Darko Cherepnalkoski & Andreas Karpf & Igor Mozetič & Miha Grčar, 2016. "Cohesion and Coalition Formation in the European Parliament: Roll-Call Votes and Twitter Activities," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(11), pages 1-27, November.
    2. Uxía Carral & Jorge Tuñón & Carlos Elías, 2023. "Populism, cyberdemocracy and disinformation: analysis of the social media strategies of the French extreme right in the 2014 and 2019 European elections," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-12, December.
    3. Zhenpeng Li & Xijin Tang & Zhenjie Hong, 2022. "Collective attention dynamic induced by novelty decay," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 95(8), pages 1-11, August.

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