Fluctuations and extreme events in the public attention on Italian legislative elections

Abstract

Abstract The share of social media attention to political candidates was shown to be a good predictor of election outcomes in several studies. This attention to individual candidates fluctuates due to incoming daily news and sometimes reflects long-term trends. By analyzing Twitter data in the 2013 and 2022 election campaign we observe that, on short timescales, the dynamics can be effectively characterized by a mean-reverting diffusion process on a logarithmic scale. This implies that the response to news and the exchange of opinions on Twitter lead to attention fluctuations spanning orders of magnitudes. However, these fluctuations remain centered around certain average levels of popularity, which change slowly in contrast to the rapid daily and hourly variations driven by Twitter trends and news. In particular, on our 2013 data we are able to estimate the dominant timescale of fluctuations at around three hours. Finally, by considering the extreme data points in the tail of the attention variation distribution, we could identify critical events in the electoral campaign period and extract useful information from the flow of data.