More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this question using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composition. With over 500 million active users in 2012, Twitter now represents a new frontier for the study of human behavior. This research provides a framework for incorporating this emerging medium into the computational social science toolkit. 1 Electronic copy available at

Results for Regression of Republican Vote Share on Tweet Share with Controls.

<p>Explaining Republican vote share with the proportion of tweets that included a Republican candidate during the three months before the 2010 election. The share of Republican tweets remains significant after adding controls. Standard error (SE) is in parentheses.</p>*<p>().</p><p>** ().</p>***<p>().</p

Effects of Name Share Mention by Month.

<p>Effects of Republican tweet share during the months of August, September, and October with a 95% confidence interval.</p

2012 Republican Tweet Share vs. Vote Share.

<p>Bivariate relationship between the share of occurrences of Republican names in tweets and vote share in the 2012 congressional elections. We show a significant positive relationship.</p

Results for Regression of Republican Vote share on User Share with Controls.

<p>Explaining Republican vote share with the proportion of users who included a Republican candidate in at least one tweet during the three months before the 2010 election. The relationship remains significant after adding controls. Standard error (SE) is in parentheses.</p><p>* ().</p>**<p>().</p>***<p>().</p

2010 Republican Tweet Share vs. Vote Share.

<p>Bivariate relationship between the share of occurrences of Republican names in tweets and vote share in the 2010 congressional elections. We show a significant positive relationship.</p