NDLI: Tweets and Votes: A Study of the 2011 Singapore General Election

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Skoric, M. Poor, N. Achananuparp, P. Ee-Peng Lim Jing Jiang
Copyright Year	2012
Abstract	This study focuses on the uses of Twitter during the elections, examining whether the messages posted online are reflective of the climate of public opinion. Using Twitter data obtained during the official campaign period of the 2011 Singapore General Election, we test the predictive power of tweets in forecasting the election results. In line with some previous studies, we find that during the elections the Twitter sphere represents a rich source of data for gauging public opinion and that the frequency of tweets mentioning names of political parties, political candidates and contested constituencies could be used to make predictions about the share of votes at the national level, although the accuracy of the predictions was significantly lower that in the studies done in Germany and the UK. At the level of constituency the predictive power of tweets was much weaker, although still better than chance. The findings suggest that the context in which the elections take place also matters, and that issues like media freedoms, competitiveness of the elections and specifics of the electoral system may lead to certain over- and under-estimations of voting sentiment. The implications for future research are discussed.
Starting Page	2583
Ending Page	2591
File Size	195188
Page Count	9
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781457719257
ISSN	15301605
e-ISBN	9780769545257
DOI	10.1109/HICSS.2012.607
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2012-01-04
Publisher Place	USA
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Twitter Nominations and elections Media Educational institutions Internet Blogs Context Singapore politics voting
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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