# Forecasting election results by studying brand importance in online news

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05762 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05762/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [140 Characters to Victory?: Using Twitter to Predict the UK 2015 General Election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.01511/) (2015)
- [Two betweenness centrality measures based on Randomized Shortest Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.03147/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Studying the association of online brand importance with museum visitors: An application of the semantic brand score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07749/) (2021)
- [As long as you talk about me: The importance of family firm brands and the contingent role of family-firm identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13815/) (2021)
- [Editorial introduction: The power of words and networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11263/) (2021)
- [A new system for evaluating brand importance: A use case from the fashion industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14657/) (2021)
- [Evaluating and improving social awareness of energy communities through semantic network analysis of online news](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01892/) (2022)
- [Brand Network Booster: A new system for improving brand connectivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16228/) (2023)
- [Free Access to World News: Reconstructing Full-Text Articles from GDELT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16063/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study uses the semantic brand score, a novel measure of brand importance in big textual data, to forecast elections based on online news. About 35,000 online news articles were transformed into networks of co-occurring words and analyzed by combining methods and tools from social network analysis and text mining. Forecasts made for four voting events in Italy provided consistent results across different voting systems: a general election, a referendum, and a municipal election in two rounds. This work contributes to the research on electoral forecasting by focusing on predictions based on online big data; it offers new perspectives regarding the textual analysis of online news through a methodology which is relatively fast and easy to apply. This study also suggests the existence of a link between the brand importance of political candidates and parties and electoral results.