Tag: Elections & polls
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Do likes predict votes? Facebook engagement and 34 European elections
Parties’ Facebook engagement before an election was related to their vote share, but it told us much less than the previous election result, and added almost nothing once that was known.
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Facebook kept pace with public attention. It didn’t lead it.
Comparing Facebook engagement for British parties and leaders with Wikipedia reading and Google searches from 2015 to 2020, the big spikes mostly came on the same day, with no reliable leader, and none of the three came close to the polls.
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Can Facebook engagement forecast an election?
Across 31 European elections, parties’ shares of Facebook engagement missed the vote by 9.6 points on average, against 1.8 for the final polls. A new paper from my doctoral data asks what engagement does and does not tell us.
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Loudest at the edges: Belgian politicians on Facebook before the 2019 election
Before Belgium’s 2019 election, Vlaams Belang politicians’ Facebook pages drew 48% of all interactions on 121 politicians’ pages, against 12% of the vote. A new paper maps where the engagement gathered.
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The bigger Facebook page lost: Greece, SYRIZA and New Democracy
Before Greece’s 2019 national election, SYRIZA and Tsipras drew 61% of the interactions on five parties’ Facebook pages against 36% of the vote. A new paper asks why the bigger page lost.
