German Bundestag Elections 2013: Twitter Usage by Electoral Candidates

The data is a result of a research project at GESIS which aimed to explore social media communication related to the election of the German parliament on September 22nd, 2013. The data includes tweets by candidates and a file describing the key attributes of the candidates and lists their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Tweets were collected for candidates of all covered parties except the AfD. All data was publicly available at the time of data collection. Cases in which a Twitter or Facebook account was not used as part of the role as a candidate (i.e., private accounts and accounts merely used for private postings) were not included.

Due to legal reasons only the following data can be shared:

(1) A list of all candidates that were considered in the project, their key attributes and if available the identification of their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

(2) A list of Tweet-IDs which can be used to retrieve the original tweets of the candidates which they posted between June and December 2013. It includes the Tweet-ID and an ID identifying the candidate.

The data describing the candidates include variables with the following content: a subsequent number, name of candidate, first name, member of which party ("AfD", "CDU", "CSU", "Die LINKE", "FDP", "GRUENE", "PIRATEN", "SPD"), state (e.g. "Bayern"), is listed (yes, no), is directe candidate (yes, no), constituency (e.g., "Aachen I"), has facebook account (yes, no), facebook_link, has twitter account (yes, no), twitter_screenname and variables on the frequency of twitter use.