Abstract
This paper investigates the relationship between candidates’ online popularity and election results, as a step towards creating a model to forecast the results of Taiwanese elections even in the absence of reliable opinion polls on a district-by-district level. 253 of 354 legislative candidates of single-member districts in Taiwan’s 2016 general election had active public Facebook pages during the election period. Hypothesizing that the relative popularity of candidates’ Facebook posts will be positively related to their election results, I calculated each candidate’s Like Ratio (i.e. proportions of all likes on Facebook posts obtained by candidates in their district). In order to have a measure of online interest without the influence of subjective positivity, I similarly calculated the proportion of daily average page views for each candidate’s Wikipedia page. I ran a regression analysis, incorporating data on results of previous elections and available opinion poll data. I found the models could describe the result of the election well and reject the null hypothesis. My models successfully predicted 80% of winners in single-member districts and were effective in districts without local opinion polls with a predictive power approaching that of traditional opinion polls. The models also showed good accuracy when run on data for the 2014 Taiwanese municipal mayors election.
Highlights
Social media played a notable role in both the 2012 general and the 2014 local elections and as well as the latest 2016 general election in Taiwan
While presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen does have a Twitter account, the tweets are in English and Japanese so it is clearly aimed at overseas readers
The legislative election part, which this paper focuses on, was made up of three parts. 354 candidates competed for 73 seats in single-member districts; 23 candidates stood for six seats of aborigines in multi-member districts; and 179 candidates were on the party lists for selection to 34 seats by proportional representation
Summary
Social media played a notable role in both the 2012 general and the 2014 local elections and as well as the latest 2016 general election in Taiwan. Facebook is the most popular and well known social networking service (SNS) in Taiwan. 99.3% of the SNS users reported owning a Facebook account compared to only 45.7% of respondents reporting ownership of a Twitter account. Few legislative candidates use Twitter for political campaigns. I could not find any candidate in the Taipei 1st district in the 2016 election with a Twitter account. While presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen does have a Twitter account, the tweets are in English and Japanese so it is clearly aimed at overseas readers. Whatever the merits of using Twitter data to predict elections in other countries, Twitter data is not very useful for the Taiwanese
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