Research Project: Mapping Political Networks

Politicians from around the world are using Twitter accounts for direct communication with the public. They share opinions, tweet to hashtags and connect to other accounts when retweeting and replying. The resulting communication patterns can be made visible with the help of Social Network Analysis (SNA).

The Social Media Research Foundation encourages students and academics from around the world to collect, analyze and visualize such political networks. The NodeXL Pro Twitter Users Network Importer offers an easy way to import tweets from any list of Twitter users and then run a full social network and content analysis. Please download the tutorial “Mapping Political Networks with NodeXL Pro” and get started on your own datasets.

The first case study of this project takes a look at Twitter networks from the German Bundestag. All related network reports and maps can be found in NodeXL Graph Gallery under #nxlBundestag. You can download a short summary of the findings as a pdf: Mapping Political Networks with NodeXL Pro – Case Study German Bundestag