Measuring relative opinion from location-based social media: A case study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness. Social media data with geotags provide new opportunities to unveil the geographic locations of users expressing their opinions. This paper aims to answer two questions: 1) whether quantifiable measurement of public opinion can be obtained from social media and 2) whether it can produce better or complementary measures compared to opinion polls. This research proposes a novel approach to measure the relative opinion of Twitter users towards public issues in order to accommodate more complex opinion structures and take advantage of the geography pertaining to the public issues. To ensure that this new measure is technically feasible, a modeling framework is developed including building a training dataset by adopting a state-of-the-art approach and devising a new deep learning method called Opinion-Oriented Word Embedding. With a case study of the tweets selected for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we demonstrate the predictive superiority of our relative opinion approach and we show how it can aid visual analytics and support opinion predictions. Although the relative opinion measure is proved to be more robust compared to polling, our study also suggests that the former can advantageously complement the later in opinion prediction

The Post-Soviet Voter: Evidence From The Caucasus

In western liberal democracies, voting behavior is often times characterized by sociological and psychological indicators. Party identification and issues such as the economy dominant the vote function of the electorate. In the post-Soviet space, party volatility and the competitive authoritarian nature of regimes may result in voters failing to act as agents of accountability. In this dissertation, I argue that the socio-psychological theory of voting behavior applies to post-Soviet electorate in the Caucasus. I demonstrate that Armenian and Georgian voters rely on partisanship as well as perceptions of the economy when casting electoral judgment on the incumbent party. This research furthers the applicability of the socio-psychological theory beyond countries with mature and durable party structures, and demonstrates that voters in competitive authoritarian regimes can act as agents of electoral accountability

¿Cómo componer una mezcla de mercadeo de medios de comunicación para ganar una campaña electoral? Propuesta de un marco para el marketing político

This article addresses the issue of composing different media to send an integrated message to the voters in electoral campaigns and presents a framework for managing media in political marketing. The authors conducted deep interviews with strategy developers of the past presidential elections as well as two parliamentary elections in Iran to extract the strategy development process for delivering the campaign message to the target audiences. thematic analysis used for analysis of data and interviews coded in three levels of open, axial and selective. The paper suggests a sequence of audience, message and media to launch a successful campaign within a framework that starts with campaign structure and strategy and accomplished with economic effectiveness measuring and success rate.Este artículo presenta un marco para la gestión de medios en campañas electorales. Se realizaron entrevistas a profundidad con desarrolladores de estrategias en las pasadas elecciones presidenciales, así como dos elecciones parlamentarias para extraer el proceso de desarrollo de la estrategia para transmitir el mensaje de la campaña a las audiencias objetivo. El documento sugiere una secuencia de audiencia, mensaje y medios de comunicación para lanzar una campaña exitosa

Modeling and Analyzing Collective Behavior Captured by Many-to-Many Networks

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Foreclosure\u27s Fallout: Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout

With the foreclosure crisis continuing to impact individuals and communities across the country, understanding the extent of its effect on political life is tantamount. In this paper, we ask how political behaviors are influenced by the economic adversities created by this crisis: loss of home, loss of resources, and perhaps loss of political efficacy. Previous research on economic adversity focuses almost exclusively on unemployment. Here we explore the demobilizing effects of foreclosures at the individual level, community levels, and the intersection of individuals nested in communities. With a unique dataset that matches voter file data to a database on individual foreclosures, we show that the foreclosure crisis was associated with a decline in voter turnout, both individually and for those in neighborhoods hit harder by the foreclosure crisis. We find that homeowners facing the loss of their homes were less likely to go to the polls. Consistent with previous research, we also show that turnout was suppressed in neighborhoods with higher rates of foreclosure. Taken together, our results suggest that political elites were less likely to hear from constituents most directly impacted by the foreclosure crisis

Suspended accounts align with the Internet Research Agency misinformation campaign to influence the 2016 US election

Abstract The ongoing debate surrounding the impact of the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) social media campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election has largely overshadowed the involvement of other actors. Our analysis brings to light a substantial group of suspended Twitter users, outnumbering the IRA user group by a factor of 60, who align with the ideologies of the IRA campaign. Our study demonstrates that this group of suspended Twitter accounts significantly influenced individuals categorized as undecided or weak supporters, potentially with the aim of swaying their opinions, as indicated by Granger causality

Snapchat and Civic Engagement among College Students

During the 2016 presidential election cycle, Clinton and Trump used Snapchat as one part of their overall voter outreach and engagement efforts. This portion of their campaign strategy was disproportionately targeted toward younger voters, since those between 18 and 25 comprise a vast portion of Snapchat’s user base. Did their efforts, those of political parties, or those of interest groups on Snapchat produce higher levels of civic engagement among college students? We utilize a survey that we conducted from a college campus in the Midwest in October 2016 to answer this question. Using a series of matching analyses, we discover that those students who sent pictures or videos about interest groups, candidates for office, or political parties on Snapchat were more civically and politically active than otherwise similar students who had not participated in these activities