title: A multi-level geographical study of Italian political elections from Twitter data.
abstract: In this paper we present an analysis of the behavior of Italian Twitter users during national political elections. We monitor the volumes of the tweets related to the leaders of the various political parties and we compare them to the elections results. Furthermore, we study the topics that are associated with the co-occurrence of two politicians in the same tweet. We cannot conclude, from a simple statistical analysis of tweet volume and their time evolution, that it is possible to precisely predict the election outcome (or at least not in our case of study that was characterized by a "too-close-to-call" scenario). On the other hand, we found that the volume of tweets and their change in time provide a very good proxy of the final results. We present this analysis both at a national level and at smaller levels, ranging from the regions composing the country to macro-areas (North, Center, South).
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy; Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi (ISC), Department of Physics, Università "Sapienza", Roma, Italy; London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, London, United Kingdom; Linkalab, Complex Systems Computational Laboratory, Cagliari, Italy.
authors.forename: Guido
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Caldarelli
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy; Linkalab, Complex Systems Computational Laboratory, Cagliari, Italy.
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chessa
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy; Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Pammolli
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy.
authors.forename: Gabriele
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Pompa
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy; Linkalab, Complex Systems Computational Laboratory, Cagliari, Italy.
authors.forename: Michelangelo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Puliga
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy; Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Riccaboni
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy; Department of French and Italian, Princenton Univerity, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America.
authors.forename: Gianni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Riotta
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D007558:Italy; D011057:Politics