A technique for associating political alignment to users

Today people use social media (eg, Twitter) to express their views on different topics. Many political parties have utilized such social media platforms for their election campaigns. Twitter data may provide a lot of information about a users personality. We study how the personality and interest of an individual is linked with his/her political associations. We have used the data set of two political parties (AAP and BJP) pertaining to the 2014 general elections of India. We obtained 1000 users from the network around the prominent leaders of these parties and manually annotated the relevant data and trained it using SVM classifier. The results showed that interest, personality, and both considered together have relevance in determining the political associations for a user, yielding the classifier accuracy 0.60.