Candidates are chasing votes online and here's how they are getting on
POLITICAL anoraks love nothing more than having facts and figures at their disposal, statistics they can scrutinise and combine in the hope of looking into mathematical tea leaves and predicting the outcome of the election.
With the advent of the digital age, and all the communicative media that come with it, opportunities have arisen to analyse the way we talk about the election in a way that gives us some insight into how the public perceive our General Election candidates.
To this end, the Irish Examiner has teamed up with Demos, a leading UK thinktank, to take a deeper look at how our candidates have used Twitter to engage with the electorate — and as to how the public are responding.
Having worked with the BBC on its election coverage in the UK last year, Demos has developed an algorithm that analyses tweets sent by members of the public and scans them to read if they are “attitudinal” — in other words, it determines if the sentiment of each tweet is positive or negative towards the candidate.
This, along with a look at the number of tweets sent by the candidates, how often they reply to the public and how many time non-party sources tag candidates in their tweets can help us look at how twitter users are reacting to each candidate.
As with all polls and figures, this Twitter analysis comes with a health warning. The samples taken here are not as representative of the public as those taken by a polling company, which seeks to accurately represent demographics in their polls.
Twitter is a constituency in and of itself. Active users are typically, though not exclusively, middle-class and left of centre in their politics. Furthermore, as a medium it sees a reawakening at times of an election, when users (and candidates) with dormant accounts return to Twitter to effectively canvass the rest of us.
Twitter timelines are particularly plagued by Twitter canvassers during televised debates and current affairs shows, when party faithful tweet ad nauseum about how great their candidate is — and how poor their opponent is performing.
That aside, the figures put together here by Demos, which reflect the Cork constituencies from January 20 to February 9, give some insight as to how the election is playing out online. What remains to be seen is how online activity translates to the most crucial performance indicator of them all — votes.
It will come to no surprise to those familiar with the Irish Twitter landscape that Ken Curtin and the Social Democrats are ranking highly on a number of metrics in Cork East.
The first-time candidate is hugely active on Twitter, sending over 129,000 tweets since joining the social network. Mr Curtin boasts an amount of followers that dwarves that of well- established TDs.
In the first week of the campaign Mr Curtin sent 1,484 tweets — more than all other active candidates in Cork East, North-Central, North-West, and South West combined. In turn he was mentioned 2,691 times by the public on the social media site. The only other noticeably active Cork East Twitter user in week one was Labour TD and minister of state Sean Sherlock, who sent 80 tweets but was mentioned 851 times.
As for the public reaction, Demos’s algorithms show that Fine Gael’s David Stanton had the highest percentage of “positive tweets” at 96%, Mr Curtin the lowest at 69%.
Cork North Central is a constituency that has seen lots of activity from the public, but little engagement from the candidates themselves.
The Green Party’s Oliver Moran was the most active here in the first week of the campaign, sending 238 tweets, 17% of which were replies to posts from the public.
Despite sending just 17 tweets in week one of the campaign, minister of state Kathleen Lynch was the most mentioned by members of the public, who tagged her in 1,012 tweets. The algorithm however, ranks her at the bottom of the “boos and cheers” list, suggesting fewer than two in three of these tweets (62%) were positive.
Independents rule the Twitter roost in Cork North West, where Ballyhea Says No campaigner Diarmuid O’Flynn and county mayor John Paul O’Shea posted the most tweets with 235 and 106.
They are at opposite ends of the attitudinal score table, however. The algorithm indicates all tweets mentioning O’Shea in the first week were positive, compared to 70% for O’Flynn. It is noteworthy, however, that O’Shea’s sample size is just 42 tweets, compared to the 413 posts from the public mentioning O’Flynn who is by far the most mentioned Cork North West candidate on Twitter, racking up 1,264 mentions.
Tipped by many political observers to be the group of death of this election, the Cork South Central candidates are leaving no medium ignored, and are actively courting the Twitter vote.
No fewer than six candidates tweeted over 100 times in the first week of the campaign, with Fine Gael’s duo of Minister Simon Coveney and TD Jerry Buttimer sending 385 tweets out between them in the run up to the Dáil’s dissolution and in its immediate aftermath.
Despite not actively embracing the medium to the same extent as his rivals, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin was the most mentioned candidate by the public on Twitter, clocking 1,458 mentions to Mr Coveney’s 1,403.
Both are receiving mostly positive feedback, though the figures show Mr Martin and Mr Coveney had 31% and 44% negative sentiment.
Fianna Fáil finance spokesman Michael McGrath is the only candidate in the county to have received a mostly negative reception from tweeters in this timeframe, with Demos’s algorithm stating 57% of the attitudinal tweets about Mr McGrath were negative.
Cork South West is a quiet constituency on Twitter. Autism activist Fiona O’Leary was the most active with 125 tweets in the first few weeks, followed by Labour TD Michael McCarthy. The majority (67%) of Ms O’Leary’s tweets were replies to the public.
Mr McCarthy was the most mentioned by the public over the early days of the campaign, however he ranked bottom of the boos and cheers table with one in three tweets about Mr McCarthy being negative in nature.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
