Can we analyse political discourse using Twitter? Evidence from Spanish 2019 presidential election

Social networking service provider such as Twitter has become very popular communication tools for Internet and Mobile users. Our paper aims at participating into the topical debate if a tweet can shed light on future elections. After listening tweets collected during the Spanish 2019 presidential campaign between April 12 and April 26, we perform a statistical and computing analysis (based on R software) in order to reveal political discourse of the parties engaged and highlight the main messages conveyed and their resulted impact in the share of candidates’ voice. Our results show that Twitter information could be converted into a performant tool to organize digital department of the candidates helping to clarify the impact of their messages on the future voters. Our methodology is based on the use of different machine learning algorithms to clean and analyse 1.7 million of tweets.