The #BTW17 Twitter Dataset–Recorded Tweets of the Federal Election Campaigns of 2017 for the 19th German Bundestag

Nane Kratzke
Additional contact information
Nane Kratzke: Center of Excellence for Communication, Systems and Applications (CoSA), Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, 23562 Lübeck, Germany

Data, 2017, vol. 2, issue 4, 1-19

Abstract: The German Bundestag elections are the most important elections in Germany. This dataset comprises Twitter interactions related to German politicians of the most important political parties over several months in the (pre-)phase of the German federal election campaigns in 2017. The Twitter accounts of more than 360 politicians were followed for four months. The collected data comprise a sample of approximately 10 GB of Twitter raw data, and they cover more than 120,000 active Twitter users and more than 1,200,000 recorded tweets. Even without sophisticated data analysis techniques, it was possible to deduce a likely political party proximity for more than half of these accounts simply by looking at the re-tweet behavior. This might be of interest for innovative data-driven party campaign strategists in the future. Furthermore, it is observable, that, in Germany, supporters and politicians of populist parties make use of Twitter much more intensively and aggressively than supporters of other parties. Furthermore, established left-wing parties seem to be more active on Twitter than established conservative parties. The dataset can be used to study how political parties, their followers and supporters make use of social media channels in political election campaigns and what kind of content is shared.

Keywords: Twitter; dataset; Bundestag; election campaign; Germany; 19th German Bundestag (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 C80 C81 C82 C83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/2/4/34/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/2/4/34/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jdataj:v:2:y:2017:i:4:p:34-:d:115843

Access Statistics for this article

Data is currently edited by Ms. Cecilia Yang

More articles in Data from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().