Investigating the Greek political Twittersphere: Greek MPs and their Twitter network

Abstract

Social media platforms have made an impact in politics by providing the politicians with new channels of communication and by creating more active, engaged, and participative citizens, and voters. Twitter is a social media platform that has been extensively used in campaigns and in daily communication between politicians and the public in many places of the world. The aim of this study is to investigate aspects of the Greek political Twittersphere. More specifically in this study an attempt will be made to obtain and compare Twitter metrics for the MPs (members of parliament) belonging to the two most dominant parties of Greek politics. The study will also examine aspects of the social network formed by the interconnections of all the members of the Greek parliament. At last the study will focus on citizens that follow MPs. MPs and parties that have a large number of unique followers and MPs and parties that share large number of common followers will be identified using quantitative analysis of sets. The aim of this task will be to reveal politicians and parties with their own distinct club of Twitter followers and to investigate whether common followers amongst MPs and parties result from interpretable facts such as similar agendas and present or past relations. Although this study focuses solely on Greek MPs and their Twitter presence we anticipate that the methods presented can be applied in other political Twitterspheres for investigating similar aspects.