Social Media Influence and Electoral Competition

Abstract

Do social media platforms help or hinder democracy? Internet enthusiasts posit that social media could have a democratizing effect by lowering the costs of promotion, while skeptics argue that these platforms replicate or even exacerbate preexisting inequalities. We inform this debate by combining campaign finance and electoral outcome data from the Federal Election Commission with Twitter metrics of candidates who ran in the 2016 U.S. congressional elections. We find that poorer candidates, who spent less than their competitor, performed better if they had indirect influence on Twitter—getting their tweets shared by users whose own tweets are widely shared. The effect of indirect influence on election outcomes was more pronounced in races with larger financial inequities between candidates or fewer total expenses across candidates. Moreover, poorer candidates with indirect influence saw smaller vote gaps than their party’s candidate in the same district (in House races) or state (in Senate races) in 2014.

Inferring the votes in a new political landscape: the case of the 2019 Spanish Presidential elections

“…These tweets come usually from bots and have a malicious intention to create rumours and chaos [46]. Shmargad and Sanchez [47] compare the number of followers/enthusiasts of each candidate on Twitter for the 2014 U.S. Senate and the 2016 Congressional elections. They conclude that despite spending less money overall on their campaigns, candidates with greater indirect influence on Twitter (i.e.…”

“…This article deals with this controversial line of research. It aims at answering first if it is possible to infer the voting share for each candidate in an election by using Twitter, and secondly, if this media is more reliable than standard public opinion polls in a new political landscape [47].…”

“…has jumped into the field of politics in an attempt to predict the results of election campaigns by monitoring the interaction between candidates and voters [9,27,47]. The fact that more and more people are posting on the OSN had led to researchers and journalists to believe that a collective feeling is present in the OSN, which can be listened to, captured and analysed [15,19].…”

Inferring the votes in a new political landscape. The case of the 2019 Spanish Presidential elections.

“…This article deals with this controversial line of research. It aims at answering rst if it is possible to infer the voting share for each candidate in an election by using Twitter, and secondly, if this media is more reliable than standard public opinion polls in a new political landscape (Shmargad & Sanchez, 2020).…”

“…to predict consumer behaviour in the real world (Rathor et al, 2018;Volkova et al, 2015). Recently this type of analysis has jumped into the eld of politics in an attempt to predict the results of election campaigns by monitoring the interaction between candidates and voters (Awais et al, 2019;Jaidka et al, 2019;Shmargad & Sanchez, 2020). The fact that more and more people are posting on the OSN had led to researchers and journalists to believe that a collective feeling is present in the OSN, which can be listened to, captured and analysed (Budiharto & Meiliana, 2018;Cury, 2019).…”