Prediction and Analysis of Pakistan Election 2013 based on Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

The signi cance of social media has already been proven in provoking transformation of public opinion for developed countries in improving democratic process of elections. On the contrary, developing countries lacking basic necessities of life possess monopolistic electoral system. In this system, candidates are elected based on tribes, family backgrounds, or landlord in uences. They extort voters to cast votes against their promises for the provision of basic needs. Similarly voters also poll votes for personal interests being unaware of party manifesto or national interest. These issues can be addressed by social media, resulting as ongoing process of improvement for presently adopted electoral procedures. On the brighter side, people of Pakistan utilized social media to garner support and campaign for political parties in General Elections 2013. Political leaders, parties, and people of Pakistan empowered themselves additionally with social media, in disseminating party's agenda and advocacy of party's ideology on Twitter without much campaigning cost. To study e ectiveness of social media inferred from individual's political behavior, large scale analysis, sentiment detection & tweet classi cation was done in order to classify, predict and forecast election results. The experimental results depicts that social media content can be used as an e ective indicator for capturing political behaviors of di erent parties Positive, negative and neutral behavior of the party followers as well as party's campaign impact can be predicted from the analysis. The analytical ndings proved to be having considerable correspondence with actual results as published by Election Commission of Pakistan.