Abstract
We report on an eight-year longitudinal study of predicting the outcome of elections based on party mentions in tweets. Five Dutch national elections for the parliament and senate between 2011 and 2019 were examined. Configurations with four parameters were tested. For three elections, reasonably accurate predictions can be obtained that are under twice the error of the classic polls, but only after post-hoc optimization. When the same optimal parameter configuration is used for all elections, the results worsen.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
References
Anuta, D., Churchin, J., Luo, J.: Election bias: comparing polls and twitter in the 2016 us election. arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.06232 (2017)
De Hond, M.: Dutch Election Polls (2011–2019). https://home.noties.nl/peil/wekelijkse-stemming/
Dwi Prasetyo, N., Hauff, C.: Twitter-based election prediction in the developing world. In: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media, pp. 149–158. ACM (2015)
Gaurav, M., Srivastava, A., Kumar, A., Miller, S.: Leveraging candidate popularity on Twitter to predict election outcome. In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis, p. 7. ACM (2013)
Gayo-Avello, D.: I wanted to predict elections with Twitter and all I got was this Lousy Paper”-a balanced survey on election prediction using Twitter data. arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.6441 (2012)
Gayo-Avello, D.: No, you cannot predict elections with Twitter. IEEE Internet Comput. 16(6), 91–94 (2012)
Gayo-Avello, D.: A meta-analysis of state-of-the-art electoral prediction from Twitter data. Soc. Sci. Comput. Rev. 31, 649–679 (2013)
Gayo-Avello, D., Metaxas, P.T., Mustafaraj, E.: Limits of electoral predictions using twitter. In: Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2011)
Huberty, M.: Can we vote with our tweet? On the perennial difficulty of election forecasting with social media. Int. J. Forecast. 31(3), 992–1007 (2015)
Ibrahim, M., Abdillah, O., Wicaksono, A.F., Adriani, M.: Buzzer detection and sentiment analysis for predicting presidential election results in a Twitter nation. In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop (ICDMW), pp. 1348–1353. IEEE (2015)
Jungherr, A., Jürgens, P., Schoen, H.: Why the pirate party won the German election of 2009 or the trouble with predictions: a response to Tumasjan, A., Sprenger, T.O, Sander, P.G., Welpe, I.M. “predicting elections with Twitter: what 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. Soc. Sci. Comput. Rev. 30(2), 229–234 (2012)
Kagan, V., Stevens, A., Subrahmanian, V.: Using Twitter sentiment to forecast the 2013 Pakistani election and the 2014 Indian election. IEEE Intell. Syst. 30(1), 2–5 (2015)
Murthy, D.: Twitter and elections: are tweets, predictive, reactive, or a form of buzz? Inf. Commun. Soc. 18(7), 816–831 (2015)
Sanders, E., Van den Bosch, A.: Relating political party mentions on twitter with polls and election results. In: Proceedings of DIR-2013, pp. 68–71 (2013). http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-986/paper_9.pdf
Sanders, E., de Gier, M., van den Bosch, A.: Using demographics in predicting election results with Twitter. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, Y.-Y. (eds.) SocInfo 2016. LNCS, vol. 10047, pp. 259–268. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_18
Sloan, L., Morgan, J., Burnap, P., Williams, M.: Who tweets? Deriving the demographic characteristics of age, occupation and social class from Twitter user meta-data. PLoS ONE 10(3), e0115545 (2015)
Tjong Kim Sang, E., Van den Bosch, A.: Dealing with big data: the case of Twitter. Comput. Linguist. Neth. J. 3, 121–134 (2013)
Tjong Kim Sang, E., Bos, J.: Predicting the 2011 Dutch senate election results with Twitter. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Analysis in Social Media, pp. 53–60. Association for Computational Linguistics (2012)
Tsakalidis, A., Papadopoulos, S., Cristea, A.I., Kompatsiaris, Y.: Predicting elections for multiple countries using Twitter and polls. IEEE Intell. Syst. 30(2), 10–17 (2015)
Tumasjan, A., Sprenger, T.O., Sandner, P.G., Welpe, I.M.: Predicting elections with Twitter: what 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. ICWSM 10, 178–185 (2010)
Wang, L., Gan, J.Q.: Prediction of the 2017 French election based on twitter data analysis using term weighting. In: 2018 10th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CEEC), pp. 231–235. IEEE (2018)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendices
Appendix
A Absolute Errors for all parties
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sanders, E., van den Bosch, A. (2019). A Longitudinal Study on Twitter-Based Forecasting of Five Dutch National Elections. In: Weber, I., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11864. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34971-4_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34971-4_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34970-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34971-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)