Tweet as a Tool for Election Forecast: UK 2015 General Election as an Example DRAFT

In this essay we explore the utility of using Twitter conversations to explain election outcomes. Our efforts are based on a large corpus of Tweets collected during the six-month period approaching the 2015 UK election. Our analysis includes the geo-location of tweets, sentiment analysis, and issue/topic modelling. The analysis focuses on England and Scotland. The interpretation of the Twitter landscape of Scotland is straightforward: the Scottish National Party dominated the Twitter conversation on all aspects including the number of tweets, general sentiment, and the evaluation of key issues. In contrast, the results of England are more nuanced: Generally speaking, the Labour Party was the slight favorite; however, the Conservative Party had a slight edge over Labour on certain issues that may have been critical in the ultimate Tory victory. We suspect this poor performance of EnglishTweets in explaining election outcomes is the consequences of the population of Twitter users being unrepresentative of the country’s population. We discuss the strategy to remove the biases through collecting and analysing demographic information of Twitter users.