UK May 6 elections: A cross-party Twitter analysis

On Thursday, May 6th 2021, people across the UK voted for their representatives for local councils (England), for the Scottish Parliament (Scotland) and for the Welsh Senedd (Wales). The months leading to the elections were emotionally charged. From Brexit being finalised to the murder of Sarah Everard and the subsequent protests/riots, talks about revitalizing the economy, and the passing of Prince Phillip, there were a lot of big topics that monopolised the attention of the media. And of course, all of these while the COVID-19 pandemic was at full scale and the need for fast vaccination of the population was of utmost importance.

As per usual, these topics, among others, were the centre of discussion of people, media, and politicians. In this article, we attempt to explore how parliament members and parties reacted (if they did) by analysing what they posted on Twitter. We analyzed the differences across political parties and also across the UK nations, including the devolved administrations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland

Data

In total 409,035 tweets were collected from 864 members of the UK parliaments (Westminster MPs, Scotland’s MSPs, Wales’s MSs, and Northern Ireland’s MLAs) from a time period between January 01 2021 to May 09 2021. Figures 1 and 2 display a more detailed distribution of tweets and parliament members while Figure 3 provides a general overview of the distribution of tweets over time.

As can be observed from Figure 3 below, there are some general trends (e.g parliament members tend to tweet more during the weekdays with tweets on weekends being up to 50% less) and also some big spikes at hint major news (e.g., protests against police at the beginning of March or the elections at the beginning of May).

Flag usage

Having collected the dataset, initially we wanted to explore how often MPs use flag emojis for the UK nations in their tweets (particularly 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿), if there is a difference between nations, possibly influenced by the independence movements in Wales and Scotland, and also as a comparison between Labour and Conservatives. The figures below display the usage of the Union flag by each set of parliament members along with the flag of the respective nation (for the UK Parliament the usage of the flag of England is displayed) for the top three parties (based on MPs) in each parliament.

UK Parliament MPs

Welsh Senedd MSs

Scottish Parliament MSPs

Clearly, the conservative parties in every UK parliament use the Union flag more frequently, with the Conservatives in the Westminster Government being the most consistent in using the Union flag in approximately 4% of tweets each day. In general, Conservative MPs in the UK parliament are more keen in including the English flag in their tweets, however all parties seem to follow the same trend with a peak during the last week of April at St George’s Day. An interesting observation is that the Welsh flag appears more frequently across the top three parties in the Senedd than the Scottish flag appears in tweets from the Scottish Parliament. All top three Welsh parties seem comfortable using the Welsh flag whereas the Scottish flag is mostly used by the SNP. As an additional note, we should mention that the MSs of Plaid Cymru, the party with the most frequent use of Welsh flag, tweet frequently in Welsh with almost 35% of all their tweets being in the native language of Wales.

Topics: Keyword Analysis

Following our analysis on flag usage, we attempt to identify topics that parliament members of different parties and different parliaments tweet about. To achieve this, we initially extracted the most important terms for each party. An interesting observation is that in the UK parliament, important terms for the Conservatives include words such as “vaccine”, “jab” and “doses” where in the Labour tweets we found terms such as “pay”, “workers” and “cut” but almost no mention of vaccination. This is an indication that Labour MPs try to focus on other issues while Conservative MPs are trying to capitalize on the successful vaccination rollout in the UK (as we will see below, however, this trend is reversed in Wales, with Labour MPs tending to talk about vaccines more frequently).

We further explore the tweets gathered by using relevant keywords as search terms to measure how popular some topics are among the politicians.

Independence:

In general, tweets relevant to independence (either for or against) are not that common. In Wales Plaid Cymru is the party talking most about it (3% of it’s tweets mention independence), whereas in Northern Ireland it is a bit more popular topic appearing in around 3% of both DUP’s and Sinn Fein’s tweets. Surprisingly, in Scotland the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party seems to talk more about this topic (5% of tweets) than the SNP (3.5% of tweets).

COVID-19/Vaccinations

Based on the initial evidence provided from extracting important terms we search tweets by specific terms related to COVID-19 (e.g pandemic, coronavirus) and also perform a different search using terms related to vaccines. The above graphs (COVID-19 related and Vaccinations related) show that even though COVID-19 is a relatively popular subject across all parties, when considering vaccinations it is clear that the ruling parties in Wales (Welsh Labour) and the UK (Conservatives) try to capitalize on the vaccination progress they have made while opposition parties avoid the subject.

Police/protest:

During the months leading to the elections we saw a significant number of protests, for various reasons, and people complaining about police violence. The above figure (Police/Protest related) shows the percentage of tweets for each party that contain relevant terms (e.g. police, killthebill). Considering that the highest percentage is 3% (UK Labour), it seems that it is not a popular topic among MPs. However, a trend is observed among Labour MPs who tend to tweet more about the subject.

EU/Brexit:

Finally, we tried to find who is talking on subjects related to the European Union and Brexit. The above graph indicates that EU/Brexit is a popular topic for parties in Northern Ireland, which can be justified with the discussions going about the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and to a lesser degree from the SNP party (both in the main and Scottish parliaments).

Topic Model Analysis

We further investigate topics appearing by using a topic modelling algorithm that is applied on the tweets collected for each parliament and automatically extracts topics. Essentially, we automatically split all the tweets by UK and Wales/Scotland/N.Ireland parliament members into 40 topics and 20 topics, respectively. You can find more about all the topics here and in the following we summarize the most interesting findings.

Vaccination. Our analysis (see Figure below) shows that there were more discussions around vaccination during the first term of 2021, with the majority of MPs tweeting less about the subject after the end of February, with an exception of Conservative MPs whose tweets about vaccination suddenly rose by mid-March. Vaccination seems to be more of a hot topic for Welsh MPs, with the majority of the tweets around vaccination during January and February coming from MPs representing the Welsh Conservative Party and Welsh Labour. It is interesting this contrast in which UK Labour MPs almost do not tweet about vaccinations, as seemingly this is sold as a success by the current UK government (and by the current Welsh Labour administration).

Independence.

Another topic that was deemed interesting to explore further across all parliaments was independence. The following figure (Topic: Independence) displays how popular this subject is among parties through time. Not surprisingly, this is a popular topic for pro-independence parties such as Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru, with SNP MPs heavily tweeting about it during March (20% of tweets). Moreover, for Plaid Cymru, it is interesting to notice the gradual drop after April and as we approached the elections, remaining a popular topic nonetheless. Finally, it is important to note that this topic includes tweets where MPs mention independence movements but not necessarily support them.

Police/protests and equality. When considering the UK’s main parliament, we looked into tweets dealing with either police and protests (Police/Protests) and tweets about women and minority rights (Equality). For both topics we observe a similar spike of tweets near the end of March, the time of the death of Sarah Everard and the International women’s day (March 8). In general, Labour’s MPs seem to be more active when considering these topics especially, commenting on issues about policing and protesting. Another spike in the Rights/Equality topic is observed at the beginning of May, which coincides with the anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Analysis by country (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland)

We continue the analysis of tweets based on the topics identified by inspecting each parliament separately.

Wales. For Wales our analysis is focused around the economy, including subjects such as infrastructure, jobs and investments. As can be observed in the Figure below (“Wales Topic: Economy”), economy is a hot topic for the Welsh Conservative Party, never dropping below 10% of the tweets made by their MPs. As election time approaches, it is interesting to see how different the trends are for the Welsh Conservative and Labour parties. While for the Welsh Conservatives almost one out of three tweets is about the economy there is a significant drop for the Labour MPs who seem to avoid the subject (5% of tweets).

Scotland. Regarding Scotland, one topic that stands out revolves around sexual harassment. Earlier this year, several MSPs from the Scottish National Party were accused of sexual harassment and this did not go unnoticed from the Scottish Conservatives. Even though for Conservative MPs harassment was a main point of discussion from late February to the end of March, another opposition party (Scottish Labour) decided to not capitalize on it.

N.Ireland. Finally, for N.Ireland we focus on tweets relevant to LGBT community and rights. This topic seems to have attracted the attention of all the major parties of the N.Ireland Assembly. Our analysis (Figure “N.Ireland: Topic LGBT”) reveals that the top three parties follow an almost identical trend around this topic, with DUP MPs being less interested in it. The interest around LGBT peaks late on April when the N.Ireland Assembly voted to ban gay conversion therapy. As a final note, similar to independence, a tweet assigned on the LGBT topic can be either for or against the movement.