TY - JOUR T1 - A Multi-Level Geographical Study of Italian Political Elections from Twitter Data A1 - Caldarelli, Guido A1 - Chessa, Alessandro A1 - Pammolli, Fabio A1 - Pompa, Gabriele A1 - Puliga, Michelangelo A1 - Riccaboni, Massimo A1 - Riotta, Gianni Y1 - 2014/05/06 N2 - In this paper we present an analysis of the behavior of Italian Twitter users during national political elections. We monitor the volumes of the tweets related to the leaders of the various political parties and we compare them to the elections results. Furthermore, we study the topics that are associated with the co-occurrence of two politicians in the same tweet. We cannot conclude, from a simple statistical analysis of tweet volume and their time evolution, that it is possible to precisely predict the election outcome (or at least not in our case of study that was characterized by a “too-close-to-call” scenario). On the other hand, we found that the volume of tweets and their change in time provide a very good proxy of the final results. We present this analysis both at a national level and at smaller levels, ranging from the regions composing the country to macro-areas (North, Center, South). JF - PLOS ONE JA - PLOS ONE VL - 9 IS - 5 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0095809 SP - e95809 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0095809 ER -