Reading Political Sentiment and Mood of the Electorate Through Twitter Data

In this day and age of social media, Twitter plays an important role when it comes to election campaigning. Twitter has been seemingly popular among leaders of the western world, but the advent of accessible and affordable internet connectivity had led to its inroads in the India electoral ecosystem. Major political parties have their twitter accounts with millions of active followers. Government departments and respective ministers are now using Twitter as a means of publicizing public interest schemes among their followers. Twitter is being used as a tool for addressing current followers and appealing to potential future voters. In this paper, we present a popularity analysis between two national parties, i.e. BJP and INC. The work discusses the extent of positive popularity each party enjoys in various cities in India. Twitter data is harvested for analysis from seventeen different cities spread across four different zones in India. We examine the growth of BJP and its prominence in certain social groups. The paper talks about the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his emergence as a nationwide leader. Finally, we present positive takeaways from our analysis that may interest any political pundit of Indian democracy.