Twitter Sentiment Analysis of the 2019 Indian Election

Abstract

In 2019, the Indian Loksabha Election saw around 360 million tweets on Twitter, giving their opinions and showing their sentiment toward the political leaders and their parties. The political parties have used this technique to run their campaigns and understand the opinions of the public; this also enables them to modify their campaigns accordingly. We performed text mining on approximately 2 million tweets collected over four months that referenced four national political parties in India during the campaigning period for the Loksabha election in 2019. We have identified the sentiment of Twitter users toward each of the considered Indian political parties (Congress, BJP, AAP and BSP) using Valence Aware Dictionary and sentiment Reasoner (VADER).