The Twitter Activity of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates in the 2015 UK General Election (dataset)

Abstract

The dataset is produced as a part of the ‘Media in Context and the 2015 General Election: How Traditional and Social Media Shape Elections and Governing’ project. It is an 18 month project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project collected data on traditional and social media coverage of the 2015 UK General Election in order to address the salient questions about the role of media in the context of the General Election and to provide media content data for others interested in media and media effects. This is a candidate-level machine-coded dataset of over 1,500 Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) who tweeted between March 30 and May 7, 2015. It includes summary tweets statistics (e.g., Twitter user ID and date it was created, numbers of favourites, URLs, photos, retweets, followers), PPCs’ parties and the seats they contested, as well as the key constituency electoral characteristics from the British Election Study (BES).