… In many elections, voters choose their candidate along party lines. But in the case of the Tokyo governor, issues are believed to be more important than the party. We want to understand which issues are important, and how these issues vary across Tokyo. The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun has been looking at the issues voters care about in this election by running telephone surveys in Tokyo. But there may be problems with telephone surveys, such as survey respondents being older or more conservative than the social media generation. To address this gap, we use Twitter to analyze candidates’ and voters’ tweets to draw inferences about voter preferences regarding the election. CONT.
Steve Pickering (Kobe U.), Seiki Tanaka (Syracuse U.) & Kyohei Yamada (International U. of Japan), The Monkey Cage