Can Social Media Predict Election Results? Evidence From New Zealand

Abstract

AbstractThe importance of social media for election campaigning has received a lot of attention recently. Using data from the 2011 New Zealand general election and the size of candidates' social media networks on Facebook and Twitter, we investigate whether social media is associated with election votes and probability of election success. Overall, our results suggest that there is a statistically significant relationship between the size of online social networks and election voting and election results. However, the size of the effect is small and it appears that social media presence is therefore only predictive in closely contested elections.KEYWORDS: social mediaelectionsvotingNew Zealand NotesIncluding both sets of variables in a single model does not substantially change the results or conclusions of our paper, but adds the problem of multicollinearity due to the close correlation between the candidates' numbers of Facebook friends and Twitter followers.If the candidate was not on their respective party list, or running as an independent, they were given a large value to indicate this.