India 2014: Facebook ‘Like’ as a Predictor of Election Outcomes

Abstract

Can the count of ‘likes’ recorded on the Facebook page of a party predict whether it will win the elections or not? To answer this question in the Indian setting in the context of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the political trend on Facebook was estimated using the numbers of ‘likes’ recorded on verified Facebook fan pages during the period of study—24 January to 12 May 2014. A strong positive correlation was found to exist between the number of ‘likes’ a party or its leader secured on their official Facebook fan page and their popular vote share. A single latent variable—presumably, the political preferences of the people—explained 91.37% of the total variance in those two variables. Furthermore, the time period during which the ‘likes’ were recorded was found to have a moderating effect on the positive relationship between the ‘likes’ and votes. It was found that the month preceding the voting period was the best to predict the vote share using ‘likes’—with 86.6% accuracy.