Analysis of political positioning from politician’s tweets

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Twitter have become important communication channels for politicians to interact with the electorate and communicate their stances on policy issues. In contrast to party manifestos, which lay out curated, compromised positions, the full range of positions within the ideological bounds of a party can be found on social media. This begs the question of how aligned the ideological positions of parties on social media are with their respective manifesto. To assess the alignment of social media and manifesto positions, we correlate the positions automatically retrieved from the tweets with manifesto-based positions for the German federal elections of 2017 and 2021. Additionally, we assess whether the change in positions over time is aligned between social media and manifestos. We retrieve ideological positions by aggregating distances between parties from sentence representations of their members' tweets from a corpus containing >2M individual tweets of 421 German politicians. We leverage domain-specific information by training a sentence embedding model such that representations of tweets with co-occurring hashtags are closer to each other than ones without co-occurring hashtags, following the assumption that hashtags approximate policy-related topics. Our experiments compare this political social media domain-specific model with other political domain and general domain sentence embedding models. We find high, significant correlations between the Twitter-retrieved positions and manifesto positions, especially for our domain-specific fine-tuned model. Moreover, for this model, we find overlaps in terms of how the positions change over time. These results indicate that the ideological positions of parties on Twitter correspond to the ideological positions as laid out in the manifestos to a large extent.