Study title

We collected Twitter posts that are topically related to three selected elections: the 2015 Venezuela parliamentary election, 2016 Philippines general election and 2016 Ghana general election. Using human annotators and trained classifiers, we built two datasets in tweet-level and incident-level. Tweet-level dataset is consist of annotated tweets, however the incident-level dataset contains grouped tweets and the reported incident details by each group of tweets. Electoral violence is a common theme in developing countries all around the world where they destabilize basic standards for democratic elections. Violence against candidates, voters, journalists and election officials can reduce voters’ choices and suppress the vote. Nowadays, social media platforms such as Twitter are popular as a medium for reporting and discussing current news and events, including political events. In particular, by comparing Twitter and newswire for breaking news, found that Twitter leads newswire in reporting political events. Such a conclusion indicates that Twitter is useful for monitoring and studying political events, including elections. Our datasets enable further electoral violence studies based on social media data, which can provide valuable insights on explaining and mitigating electoral violence. Elections are a means of adjudicating political differences through peaceful, fair, democratic mechanisms. When elections are beset by violence, these aims are compromised and political crises often result. Despite the undisputed importance of understanding electoral violence, there has been only a limited body of systematic comparative research on this topic. If scholars and practitioners are to gain insight into the dynamics of electoral violence and develop superior strategies for deterring it, better data and more sophisticated theories are required. The aim of this project is to develop conceptual, methodological and practical tools to facilitate an enhanced...