Title
Characterizing and modeling an electoral campaign in the context of Twitter: 2011 Spanish Presidential election as a case study.
Abstract
Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians' main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for politicians to interact with their potential voters. Exploiting the available potential of these tools to maximize their influence over voters is one of politicians' actual challenges. To step in this direction, we have analyzed the user activity in the online social network Twitter, during the 2011 Spanish Presidential electoral process, and found that such activity is correlated with the election results. We introduce a new measure to study political sentiment in Twitter, which we call the relative support. We have also characterized user behavior by analyzing the structural and dynamical patterns of the complex networks emergent from the mention and retweet networks. Our results suggest that the collective attention is driven by a very small fraction of users. Furthermore, we have analyzed the interactions taking place among politicians, observing a lack of debate. Finally, we develop a network growth model to reproduce the interactions taking place among politicians. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4729139]
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1063/1.4729139
CHAOS
Field
DocType
Volume
Presidential system,Growth model,Social network,Advertising,Presidential election,Control theory,Complex network,Politics,Mathematics
Journal
22
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2.0
1054-1500
29
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.16
5
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
J Borondo1734.78
A J Morales2502.82
Juan Carlos Losada3567.08
Rosa M. Benito4556.17