A political analyst conducted an observational study in 201420142014 that measured the rate of voter dissatisfaction with the United States Congress in several United States congressional districts and the increase in the number of political attack advertisements televised in the same districts since the previous congressional election cycle.
The study concluded that the rate of voter dissatisfaction in the districts is comparable to the rate of increase of televised political attack ads in the same districts since the previous congressional election cycle. Based on this data, which conclusion is valid?
Answers
Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district's racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media.
Introduction
An increasingly important question for researchers in a variety of fields is whether social media activity can be used to assess offline political behavior. Online social networking environments present a tremendous scientific opportunity: they generate large-scale data about the communication patterns and preferences of hundreds of millions of individuals [1], which can be analyzed to form sophisticated models of individual and group behavior [2], [3]. However, some researchers have questioned the validity of such data, pointing out that social media content is largely focused on entertainment and emotional expression [4], [5], potentially rendering it a poor measure of the behaviors and outcomes typically of interest to social scientists.
Additionally, social media provide a self-selected sample of the electorate. A study by Mislove et al. investigates this bias on the county level, finding that Twitter data do not accurately represent the sociodemographic makeup of the United States [6]. Furthermore, right-leaning political communication channels, such as #tcot (“Top Conservatives on Twitter”), are more active and densely connected than left-leaning channels [7]. Hargittai's work has been extremely influential in investigating gender, income, age, and other social factors that create systematic differences in Internet use, including Twitter [8]–[10]. Researchers have also found that extraversion and openness to experiences are positively related to social media use, while emotional stability has a negative relationship [11]. Taken together, these studies suggest that social media provide a biased, non-representative sample of the population.
Despite these issues, a growing literature suggests that online communication can still be a valid indicator of offline behavior. For example, film title mentions correlate with box office revenue [12], and online expressions of public mood correlate with fluctuations in stock market prices, sleep, work, and happiness [13]–[15]. In addition, a number of studies have examined the relationship between online activity and election outcomes [16]–[19]. However, many of these studies have been criticized for a variety of reasons, including: using a self-selected and biased sample of the population; investigating only a small number of elections; or not using sociodemographic controls [20], [21]. Tumasjan analyzed the relationship between tweets and votes in the 2009 German election [18], but these results have been criticized because they depend upon arbitrary choices made by the authors in their analysis [22].
Here, we provide a systematic link between social media data and real-world political behavior. Over two U.S. congressional election cycles, we show a statistically significant relationship between tweets and electoral outcomes that persists after accounting for an array of potentially confounding variables, including incumbency, baseline district partisanship, conventional media coverage and the sociodemographics of each district. These results do not rely on any knowledge of the physical location of these users at the time of their post or their emotional valence. These results indicate that the “buzz” or public discussion about a candidate on social media can be used as an indicator of voter behavior.
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Answer:
The only conclusion that is valid based on the data from the observational study is: There is a correlation between the increase in the rate of televised political attack ads since the previous congressional election and the rate of voter dissatisfaction in the observed districts.
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