Political Disaffection: a case study on the Italian Twitter community
This work addresses political disaffection for researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study tackled political disaffection in the Italian Twitter community by analyzing Twitter data with machine learning, validating the data against public opinion surveys and showing correlations with news peaks.
In our work we analyse the political disaffection or "the subjective feeling of powerlessness, cynicism, and lack of confidence in the political process, politicians, and democratic institutions, but with no questioning of the political regime" by exploiting Twitter data through machine learning techniques. In order to validate the quality of the time-series generated by the Twitter data, we highlight the relations of these data with political disaffection as measured by means of public opinion surveys. Moreover, we show that important political news of Italian newspapers are often correlated with the highest peaks of the produced time-series.