The Belgian elections are closing in fast. Political pollsters and classic media worked hard to get some first impressions of the Belgian political mind. In addition, creative agencies launched campaigns that also observe a thing or two online. Fact is that Obama did have his online business pretty well covered, and it might have had a significant impact on his results. This might trick you into thinking buzz could represent voting interest, but that wouldn’t be a solid thought process. While buzz is an interesting aspect to look at, it often equals to push and is generated by a target group that is most likely not that representative. What I would like to see, is data showing what political information Belgian internet users actively pull in just before the elections. In this case, pull would translate to search queries.
Has anything good ever come out of search query analysis? No idea. The provided tools are geared towards advertising – not politics. But a similar experiment was done on predicting the next American idol. The analysis proved irrelevant as the other guy seems to have won. What are the biasses? A big bias when merely analyzing political party search volume is the real voting behavior. As Pietel already pointed out: people might cast votes from sympathy towards a political personality. Party search volume would then become obsolete. A new analysis with all politicians and their working parties would be required to make the results more valuable again. Since I don’t have time for that, I won’t go into this. A second bias would be generated buzz. When search volume is generated because of news, fraud, or buzz in general around a political party, this can’t be seen as a representation of voting interest. Let’s anticipate on that. Above graph shows proof of biased search volume: the search spike clearly yields the news spike on both political parties. When going back in time to what happened, we recall a defecting politician between these two parties. The search volume was biassed at that point and probably doesn’t reflect voting interests.
Last but not least: the users that do make an effort on doing some online research are probably not representative for the Belgian collective mind. Then why bother analyzing? Just because we can. Plus, voting is mandatory in Belgium - and with an internet penetration of nearly 70% there somehow still might be a significant amount of people researching their parties of interest shortly before the elections. Next to this, many people still seem undecided. Second, I’m assuming users run these searches from a frame of interest - not entertainment. If we look at the data from the American Idol show, we see big search spikes after a contestant gave a good performance. So that could mean people might have been coming from a frame of entertainment at those points, and not genuine voting interest. So based on all these assumptions, don’t take anything that follows serious. What does classic media predict? Limited to Flemish observations, these were the main things that came out: - CD&V stays the biggest party.
- LDD won’t grow or even loses
- Green party breaks in
- SLP doesn’t stand a chance
++ Update: The VRT just published new poll results. Seems like they don't agree with the second statement.
What does Google data show? Some graphs with search volume:
Note that this in no way can be compared to eventual party sizes. In fact, these graphs are irrelevant as it more interesting to look at breakout and rising search terms to see if a party is gaining interest lately. For some reason, the small SLP is doing something weird here. Along with LDD in a tie it racks up the breakout searches. Both have 3 breakout search terms compared to the other parties. (Image below only shows breakouts in comparision with VLD)
Next to this there is an unexplainable search peak for this minor party at the beginning of May. I’ve pulled it through the trend analysis and Google news search, but can’t find out why that happened. Nevertheless; since such peaks are fishy and probably biassed, we better discard it.
What else is notable, is that the VLD ranked most top searches compared to other parties. The CD&V didn’t even appear in the rising searches, but kept it more or less steady to what it has always been doing. Don’t get this wrong: CD&V and NVA still account for most search volume, but only when combined. This year they will go as separate parties to the elections, and thus VLD is taking over as the party with most search volume and top searches compared to other parties. Noteworthy fact is that they had the same search behaviour during the previous elections and did lose. But this time, it seems like CD&V and NVA will have to share some interest and the VLD would benefit from that.
Conclusion So to sum up what appears to be going on with political related searches within Belgium: - Green indeed does move forward. (2 breakouts)
- Not CD&V but VLD generates most volume
- LDD still gains in popularity (3 breakouts = most)
Is there any reliability in this?
As said, seen all the biasses and the previous experiment: not at all. Another big problem is that Google doesn’t provide absolute search values. So that leaves us guessing towards the numbers they are normalizing. Because of this, we can’t even say anything about statistical correctness of the representation of the search volume. Right now the graphs seem very jumpy, what might indicate low absolute numbers.
I’ve ran sort like analysis on the elections of June 10, 2007 as a reference point, but didn’t get solid matches in terms of party sizes with the eventual result back then - although it was close.
Two things I maybe could have distilled from the data between June 3 and June 9 in 2007 were:
- A possible breakthrough of Lijst Dedecker as it ruled the breakout search terms.
- CD&V – NVA combined generated most search volume (biggest party)
But let’s just cast our vote and see afterwards.
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