# Analysis of Political Party Twitter Accounts' Retweeters During Japan's 2017 Election

## TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter retweeters of Japanese political parties during the 2017 election to understand user characteristics and diffusion patterns, revealing similarities among ruling and opposition parties and distinct traits for the Communist Party.

## Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of retweeter demographics and behaviors for multiple Japanese political parties during an election, highlighting differences and similarities.

## Key findings

- Retweeters of ruling and opposition parties share similar characteristics.
- Japanese Communist Party's retweeters differ significantly from others.
- Retweeter patterns reveal insights into political support and engagement.

## Abstract

In modern election campaigns, political parties utilize social media to advertise their policies and candidates and to communicate to the electorate. In Japan's latest general election in 2017, the 48th general election for the Lower House, social media, especially Twitter, was actively used. In this paper, we analyze the users who retweeted tweets of political parties on Twitter during the election. Our aim is to clarify what kinds of users are diffusing (retweeting) tweets of political parties. The results indicate that the characteristics of retweeters of the largest ruling party (Liberal Democratic Party of Japan) and the largest opposition party (The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan) were similar, even though the retweeters did not overlap each other. We also found that a particular opposition party (Japanese Communist Party) had quite different characteristics from other political parties.