Measuring political legitimacy with Twitter: Insights from India’s Aadhaar program

Abstract

As emerging powers forge ahead with big data initiatives, questions arise regarding the implications of these programs for governance in the Global South more broadly. One understudied aspect deals with how actors attribute legitimacy to governments’ big data activities. We explore actors’ agency in one crucial case: the world’s largest demographic and biometric data program, India’s Aadhaar. Analyzing roughly 250,000 tweets collected in the first 10 years of Aadhaar’s operation, we find that both normative acceptance and cost–benefit calculations are crucial for legitimacy attribution. This finding challenges mainstream theoretical approaches, which prioritize normative factors and often fail to examine how normative and material factors interact during legitimacy attribution. In addition, our study demonstrates a new, mixed-methods approach to measuring legitimacy attribution using Twitter data, which overcomes traditional challenges. As such, we underline the viability of Twitter data as a tool for social measurement.