Ideological Consumerism in Colombian Elections, 2015: Links between Political Ideology, Twitter Activity and Electoral Results

Abstract: Propagation of political ideologies in social networks has shown a notorious impact on voting behavior. Both the contents of the messages (the ideology) and the politicians' influence on their online audiences (their followers) have been associated with such an impact. Here we evaluate which of these factors exerted a major role in deciding electoral results of the 2015 Colombian regional elections by evaluating the linguistic similarity of political ideologies and their influence on the Twitter sphere. The electoral results proved to be strongly associated with tweets and retweets and not with the linguistic content of their ideologies or their Twitter followers. Suggestions on new ways to analyze electoral processes are finally discussed.