Twitter-based Election Prediction in the Developing World
Nugroho Dwi Prasetyo, Claudia Hauff · 2015
Elections are the main instrument of democracy. Citizens decide which entity or entities (a political party or a particular politician) should represent them. Traditionally, pre-election polls have been used to learn about trends and likely election outcomes. Predicting an election outcome based on user activity on Twitter has been shown to be a cheap alternative. While past research has focused on election prediction in the developed world (where its use is debatable), in this paper we provide a comprehensive argument for the use of Twitter-based election forecasting in the developing world. For our use case of Indonesia's presidential elections 2014, the most basic Twitter-predictor outperforms the majority of traditional polls, while the best performing predictor outperforms all traditional polls on the national level.