Understanding the outcome of an election using Twitter

OpLaDyn members from University of Buenos Aires, Engeneering Faculty, have analyzed Twitter data collected during the last electoral campaign.

This work allowed to explain how the winner of the first round of the election finally lost the second round.

After this proof of concept our colleagues  have developed a tool that allows to analyze Twitter data on “real time” and have collected a huge amount of data of the Argentinian general primary elections (PASO : Primarias Abiertas Simultaneas y Obligatorias).

The rules of this  primary election in Argentina (all the parties determine their candidate simultaneously, the election is open to all voters, and it is a compulsory vote) are such that as no party wants to risk to get few votes if they increase the offer, all the parties end up presenting only one candidate. In this way this election foresees the result of the future presidential election.

Preliminary work : Topic-based study of a Twitter political network
T. Mussi Reyero, J. I. Alvarez-Hamelin, M. G. Beiró
International School and Conference on Network Science (NetSciX’19),
Santiago, Chile.  Abstract here

Full article: Tomás Mussi Reyero, Mariano G. Beiró, J. Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin, Laura Hernández, Dimitris Kotzinos, Evolution of the political opinion landscape during electoral periods.    (in revision EPJDataScience, 2021)

A tool that allows to visualize the results aimed at a large public (in Spanish) can be found here