Abstract
The German Bundestag elections are the most important elections in Germany. This dataset comprises Twitter interactions related to German politicians of the most important political parties over several months in the (pre-)phase of the German federal election campaigns in 2017. The Twitter accounts of more than 360 politicians were followed for four months. The collected data comprise a sample of approximately 10 GB of Twitter raw data, and they cover more than 120,000 active Twitter users and more than 1,200,000 recorded tweets. Even without sophisticated data analysis techniques, it was possible to deduce a likely political party proximity for more than half of these accounts simply by looking at the re-tweet behavior. This might be of interest for innovative data-driven party campaign strategists in the future. Furthermore, it is observable, that, in Germany, supporters and politicians of populist parties make use of Twitter much more intensively and aggressively than supporters of other parties. Furthermore, established left-wing parties seem to be more active on Twitter than established conservative parties. The dataset can be used to study how political parties, their followers and supporters make use of social media channels in political election campaigns and what kind of content is shared.
Highlights
It is important to understand that this dataset description groups according to re-tweets because it is objective and considers efficiently more than 50% of all observed Twitter interactions; not all interactions and data are considered
If a Twitter user re-tweets no tweets of any political party, this user is assigned to the group ‘unknown’
The dataset contains a sample of Twitter interactions by Twitter users as raw data
Summary
It is interesting that one target of the Trump campaign was not to mobilize is own supporters, but to demobilize Clinton supporters in order to deactivate part of the political opponent’s network It should be obvious for the reader that data that have been collected during such election campaigns might contain. There exist several Twitter datasets with a clear focus on political election campaigns in countries of the European Union [3,7,13,14] This dataset has been collected to provide data for one further European country (Germany). It is more than likely that the professionalism (or the “data-drivenness”) will increase in the future This dataset might be one of the latest datasets without being affected by too many social media effects in political campaigning in Germany [15]. More details on possible applications, and on limitations and ethical considerations of this dataset can be found in Sections 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4
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