Ideological Consumerism in Colombian Elections, 2015: Links between Political Ideology, Twitter Activity and Electoral Results

TL;DR

This study analyzes the influence of Twitter activity and political ideology on the 2015 Colombian elections, finding that Twitter engagement, rather than ideological content, was more strongly associated with electoral outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a method to evaluate the impact of social media activity versus ideological content on election results, focusing on linguistic similarity and influence in Twitter data.

Findings

Twitter activity correlates with electoral results

Linguistic similarity of ideologies has limited impact

Twitter followers' influence is less significant

Abstract

Propagation of political ideologies in social networks has shown a notorious impact on voting behavior. Both the contents of the messages (the ideology) and the politicians' influence on their online audiences (their followers) have been associated with such an impact. Here we evaluate which of these factors exerted a major role in deciding electoral results of the 2015 Colombian regional elections by evaluating the linguistic similarity of political ideologies and their influence on the Twitter sphere. The electoral results proved to be strongly associated with tweets and retweets and not with the linguistic content of their ideologies or their Twitter followers. Suggestions on new ways to analyze electoral processes are finally discussed.