When Politicians Talk About Politics: Identifying Political Tweets of Brazilian Congressmen
Table 1: Dataset summary
['[EMPTY]', '[BOLD] # tweets', '[BOLD] # deputies', '[BOLD] average', '[BOLD] % political tweets', '[BOLD] # political tweets']
In this work we collected 1.1 millions public tweets from 692 Brazilian deputies from October 2013 to October 2017 by means of the Twitter API (Application Programming Interface). The list of the Twitter accounts associated with the congressmen was collected from the personal profile pages of each congressman. After this process, each account was manually validated. The tweets and the number of followers and followees of each congressman were collected twice, once in December 2015 and once in November 2017. After that, we merged these two datasets and prepared the text of the tweets for processing: we removed duplicated tweets, punctuation, words with less than 2 characters, Portuguese stop words, hashtags, URLs, and mentions. Finally, we labeled each congressmen according to their position before and after the 2014 elections. If a congressman had a sit in Congress before the elections and was able to be reelected, we labeled they as reelected. Conversely, if a politician had a sit in Congress before the elections and was not able to be reelected, we label they as loser. Finally, if a politician did not have a sit in Congress before the elections and was able to be elected in 2014 (or was a supplant of a congressman after election), we label they as newcomer. What is striking about our analysis is the amount of non-political discourse presented in the tweets of Brazilian deputies. Concerning the specific topics, the two most popular topics, comprising 25% of all tweets, are non-political: topics (1, 4), of a broad and populist nature. Note also that political tweets are scattered over many topics and the most important is topic (6), which is related to pragmatic deputy behavior and comprises 8% of all tweets.