Wikipedia traffic data and electoral prediction: towards theoretically informed models

Taha Yasseri,Jonathan Bright

doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0083-3

Abstract

This aim of this article is to explore the potential use of Wikipedia page view data for predicting electoral results. Responding to previous critiques of work using socially generated data to predict elections, which have argued that these predictions take place without any understanding of the mechanism which enables them, we first develop a theoretical model which highlights why people might seek information online at election time, and how this activity might relate to overall electoral outcomes, focussing especially on how different types of parties such as new and established parties might generate different information seeking patterns. We test this model on a novel dataset drawn from a variety of countries in the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament elections. We show that while Wikipedia offers little insight into absolute vote outcomes, it offers a good information about changes in both overall turnout at elections and in vote share for particular parties. These results are used to enhance existing theories about the drivers of aggregate patterns in online information seeking.

Highlights

As digital technologies become more and more integrated into the fabric of social life their ability to generate large amounts of information about the opinions and activities of the population increases
4 Discussion and conclusions In this paper we have sought to develop theoretically informed methods for election prediction based on information seeking behaviour on Wikipedia, responding to existing critiques of predictions generated from new sources of socially generated data
We have shown that the relative change in the number of page views to the general Wikipedia page on the election can offer a reasonable estimation of the relative change in turnout for that election at the country level

Summary

Introduction

As digital technologies become more and more integrated into the fabric of social life their ability to generate large amounts of information about the opinions and activities of the population increases. This theory of how online information seeking relates to eventual outcomes suggests that a model which uses Wikipedia page views to predict electoral outcomes should take into account several factors.

Results

Conclusion