Electoral Manifestos and Online Campaign Analysis: Case Study - The 2019 Ecuadorian Sectional Elections

Abstract

Social media is an important information outlet and a new political landscape for politicians. In fact, politicians use social media to promote their candidacies while running for office. In this paper, we discuss about an application prototype built to measure the closeness of a candidate electoral manifesto to hers/his online campaign. In particular, we show our results tracking the 2019 Ecuadorian Sectional Elections based on data collected from candidates’ timelines on Twitter during the campaign and their official campaign manifestos. We configured our application to gather information from Major candidates in the city of Quito during the 2019 Ecuadorian Sectional Elections. This prototype collected Tweets into a relational database based on each candidate’s Twitter account. For this campaign, 18 candidates run for office. From these, we gathered 17 electoral manifestos and fed them to our application. Both, tweets and manifestos were preprocessed in order to produce a high dimensional word vector describing the collected timelines of each candidate and his/her manifesto. Later, the cosine similarity was used to compare a candidate political plan against hers or his digital campaign. Our results suggest that candidates drift from their electoral manifestos during social media campaigns. We discuss possible reasons for our results and pave the path for future research.