Recurrent patterns of user behavior in different electoral campaigns: A Twitter analysis of the Spanish general elections of 2015 and 2016

TL;DR

This study analyzes millions of Twitter messages from two Spanish general elections to identify consistent behavioral patterns, revealing stable network structures and activity correlations across campaigns.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Twitter activity in two elections, uncovering recurrent behavioral patterns and network stability over time.

Findings

Significant linear correlation between the two elections' activity.

Tweet, retweet, and mention counts follow a power law.

Network topologies remain consistent across campaigns.

Abstract

We have retrieved and analyzed several millions of Twitter messages corresponding to the Spanish General elections held on the 20th of December 2015 and repeated on the 26th of June 2016. The availability of data from two electoral campaigns that are very close in time allows us to compare collective behaviors of two analogous social systems with a similar context. By computing and analyzing the time series of daily activity, we have found a significant linear correlation between both elections. Additionally, we have revealed that the daily number of tweets, retweets and mentions follow a power law with respect to the number of unique users that take part in the conversation. Furthermore, we have verified that the topologies of the networks of mentions and retweets do not change from one election to the other, indicating that their underlying dynamics are robust in the face of a change in social context. Hence, in the light of our results, there are several recurrent collective behavioral patterns that exhibit similar and consistent properties in different electoral campaigns.