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

摘要

Propagation of political ideologies in social networks has shown a notoriousimpact on voting behavior. Both the contents of the messages (the ideology) andthe politicians' influence on their online audiences (their followers) havebeen associated with such an impact. Here we evaluate which of these factorsexerted a major role in deciding electoral results of the 2015 Colombianregional elections by evaluating the linguistic similarity of politicalideologies and their influence on the Twitter sphere. The electoral resultsproved to be strongly associated with tweets and retweets and not with thelinguistic content of their ideologies or their Twitter followers. Suggestionson new ways to analyze electoral processes are finally discussed.