Quantifying Political Legitimacy from Twitter

We present a method to quantify the political legitimacy of a populace using public Twitter data. First, we represent the notion of legitimacy with respect to k-dimensional probabilistic topics, automatically culled from the politically oriented corpus. The short tweets are then converted to a feature vector in k-dimensional topic space. Leveraging sentiment analysis, we also consider the polarity of each tweet. Finally, we aggregate a large number of tweets into a final legitimacy score (i.e., L-score) for a populace. To validate our proposal, we conduct an empirical analysis on eight sample countries using related public tweets, and find that some of our proposed methods yield L-scores strongly correlated with those reported by political scientists.