2019 Thai General Election: A Twitter Analysis

Abstract

Elections are the most important part in the democracy. The general election in Thailand was held on 24 March 2019. It was the first vote in the last five years since the seizure of power by the military coup leaded by General Prayut Chan-o-cha. A social media has become a part of daily life with a real time message distribution including sharing an opinion in politics. Twitter becomes the most widely used tool for creating trends by political parties and politicians. In this paper, we propose an analysis of election result according to data analysis from Twitter and Election Commission of Thailand (ECT). We used Twitter Advanced Search to collect data within three months from January 1 to March 31, 2019. We found the top keywords and hashtags trended on Twitter as the Future Forward Party (FFP). Meanwhile, the winner of the popular vote was the Palang Pracharat Party. We found no correlation between the number of retweets and votes as only one party got the outstanding number of retweets. From the analysis of retweeters’ accounts, the characteristics of retweeters of the Future Forward Party differed from the retweeters of other parties. We then refined the analysis based on the sentiment of messages mentioning the political parties tweeted by the retweeters. The correlation coefficient between the number of positive mentions and votes became 0.615 with the removal of the FFP from the analysis. In addition, we found that the number of messages with a specific political party mentioned might reflect the election results. Finally, the TF-IDF analysis of words from the tweet messages during the campaign showed that words delivered by each party had different contextual meanings such as paying attention to people, party’s policy, complaint, and blame.