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Predicting Political Ideology from Digital Footprints

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Kitchener

    (SoDa Laboratories, Monash University)

  • Nandini Anantharama

    (SoDa Laboratories, Monash University)

  • Simon D. Angus

    (Department of Economics and SoDa Laboratories, Monash University)

  • Paul A. Raschky

    (Department of Economics and SoDa Laboratories, Monash University)

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method to predict individual political ideology from digital footprints on one of the world's largest online discussion forum. We compiled a unique data set from the online discussion forum reddit that contains information on the political ideology of around 91,000 users as well as records of their comment frequency and the comments' text corpus in over 190,000 different subforums of interest. Applying a set of statistical learning approaches, we show that information about activity in non-political discussion forums alone, can very accurately predict a user's political ideology. Depending on the model, we are able to predict the economic dimension of ideology with an accuracy of up to 90.63\% and the social dimension with an accuracy of up to 83.09\%. In comparison, using the textual features from actual comments does not improve predictive accuracy. Our paper highlights the importance of revealed digital behaviour to complement stated preferences from digital communication when analysing human preferences and behaviour using online data.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Kitchener & Nandini Anantharama & Simon D. Angus & Paul A. Raschky, 2022. "Predicting Political Ideology from Digital Footprints," Monash Economics Working Papers 2022-12, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:mos:moswps:2022-12
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    Keywords

    data mining; political ideolog; digital footprint; Reddit;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A10 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - General

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