Twitter Dataset - 2015 Spanish General Election

Abstract

Twitter dataset for a research on the 2015 Spanish General Election. The tweets were obtained through the Twitter API's Search function since November 2 to December 21, 2015. Three criteria for filtering tweets were established: two general terms linked to the elections ("#20D", "20-D"); the name and usernames of the four main parties (PP, PSOE, Podemos and Ciudadanos), and the name and usernames of the four candidates from those parties. The research assessed the tweet's issue according to Patterson (1980)'s typology for evaluating political mediatisation. The dataset contains three files: the unlabelled collection of the 15.8 million tweet ids obtained through the API, the annotated sample of the 3,117 tweet ids for assessing the issue via machine learning, and the readme.txt file. It is recommended to open the file from a text editor or through a script. The id_str must be handled as a string. If the file is open from Excel, the id_str will be interpreted as a number, and then converted into a float, losing information in this transformation