Can We Forecast Presidential Election Using Twitter Data? An Integrative Modelling Approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT Forecasting political elections has attracted a lot of attention. Traditional election forecasting models in political science generally take preference in poll surveys and economic growth at the national level as the predictive factors. However, spatially or temporally dense polling has always been expensive. In the recent decades, the exponential growth of social media has drawn enormous research interests from various disciplines. Existing studies suggest that social media data have the potential to reflect the political landscape. Particularly, Twitter data have been extensively used for sentiment analysis to predict election outcomes around the world. However, previous studies have typically been data-driven and the reasoning process was oversimplified without robust theoretical foundations. Most of the studies correlate twitter sentiment directly and solely with the election results which can hardly be regarded as predictions. To develop a more theoretically plausible approach this study draws on political science prediction models and modifies them in two aspects. First, our approach uses Twitter sentiment to replace polling data. Second, we transform traditional political science models from the national level to the county level, the finest spatial level of voting counts. The proposed model has independent variables of support rate based on Twitter sentiment and variables related to economic growth. The dependent variable is the actual voting result. The 2016 U.S. presidential election data in Georgia is used to train the model. Results show that the proposed modely is effective with the accuracy of 81% and the support rate based on Twitter sentiment ranks the second most important feature.