Parsimonious data: How a single Facebook like predicts voting behavior in multiparty systems.

ABSTRACT: This study shows how liking politicians' public Facebook posts can be used as an accurate measure for predicting present-day voter intention in a multiparty system. We highlight that a few, but selective digital traces produce prediction accuracies that are on par or even greater than most current approaches based upon bigger and broader datasets. Combining the online and offline, we connect a subsample of surveyed respondents to their public Facebook activity and apply machine learning classifiers to explore the link between their political liking behaviour and actual voting intention. Through this work, we show that even a single selective Facebook like can reveal as much about political voter intention as hundreds of heterogeneous likes. Further, by including the entire political like h

SUBMITTER: Kristensen JB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5607134 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature