Data-driven Democracy — yay or nay?
By: Populous Algo
Tags: Afghanistan, Python, Data Visualization, Machine Learning, Democracy

Addressing Citizen Concerns in Real-time

Allowing us to scrap, analyse and process data in real-time. Live data-feeds makes it easier for politicians to pinpoint issues as they start to break out. For example, a riot which is about to happen or take place in Kabul can easily be captured by our algorithms. These live feeds allow politicians to know what concerns their citizens and prioritise accordingly, by importance and severity. Maintaining these feeds in real-time can help with crisis management and aid campaigns, amongst other case-uses.

Choropleth Mapping — fed by live events and trends.

These data-feeds can be fed into choropleth maps which are interactive and allow governments to visually categorise regions based on importance in real-time.

Prototype Policy and Public Response Testing

Social media is an imperative medium for testing prototype policies. A prototype policy tested on large samples can produce an accurate consensus. Firstly, it is important to establish which areas of policies need development. This is done by looking at issues that are trending on a larger scale, typically those ones that are trending for more than 2 years to establish its status as reoccurring. Additionally, subscriber lookalike testing is used, this method involves creating psychometric profiles by combining existing data that we hold and from other reliable sources to further profile or break down people into different addressable categories. Here, we break down people into three distinct groups; those who are “most likely”, those who are “neutral” and those who are “least likely” to react positivity to a policy.

In the past, we have created psychometric profiles for key political figures in Afghanistan, aligning profiles with their political preferences. For example, voters who support Ashraf Ghani and Hamid Karzai share similar user preference and profiles such as sharing a passion for cricket. This shows that voters who support Ghani and Karzai have a similar voter profile compared to the typical voter profile of those who support Haibatullah Akhundzada or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Effective Campaign Management

Utilising social media feedback and using it to improve campaign strategies is becoming an effective way to lower costs and improve citizen engagement. Social media has rapidly become an important tool for studying socio-political issues. Funnels such as likes, comments, wall posts, public pages and groups allow people to express their views on any subject and campaigns that directly correspond with public views are highly valuable as they increase engagement.

Micro-targeting voters

While mass advertising tends to appeal to everyone, it only resonates with a select few or specific groups who respond to such advertising. Micro-targeting, on the other hand, involves targeting citizens on the basis of the views or opinions they hold, showing a very effective way of increasing engagement. Psychometric profiling allows categorising people into different personality types and thus, ADM aims to micro-target voters by aligning their key characteristics such as the pages they liked, the style of their comments, the posts they liked and the colour they prefer. Once aligned, these personality types are important in creating psychographic messages for each personality type. We do not categorise personality types into predisposed categories and instead let the data dictate the course of which categories and criteria to adopt.

Micro-targeting voters are about rewriting campaign messages in order to appeal and connect with the target audience. For instance, campaign messages promoting female education require a different structuring method for the less educated compared to more educated audience types. The most effective way to reach less educated voters who score highly on the religiosity criteria would be to adopt an emotional undertone. On the other hand, the more educated audience would better respond if the campaign is structured along the lines of anti-establishment and non-conformity. It is clear that both approaches resonate better with the different target audience and thus, increases engagement rates for issues concerning the rights of women all over the country. As a result, politicians are in a much better position to understand the diversity within the needs of their citizens and effectively reach all distinct groups in various regions, increasing their popularity and connectivity with everyone.

Profile Management

Profile management for politicians is an important factor during election times and the right metaphors and personality traits can win an entire election. Social media has drastically changed how political campaigns are managed and delivered as now campaigns also need to resonate with users online. Therefore, social media has introduced various other variables that must be taken into account to further amplify political campaigns. To manage a successful campaign, we look at other aspects such as the colour used for messages, text to image ratio, word correlations, the level of tone and outfit correlations etc. Using such variables allows us to effectively manage profile managements for politicians by increasing engagement levels. According to our data, some correlations have remained constant, for example, the colour Blue will always outperform most colours on Facebook posting. On the other hand, there are also temporary correlations that tend to have a much stronger effect and are usually products of viral trends either on social media or offline. As a consequence, we combine temporary and persistent correlations to effectively manage profiles and ensure that politicians maintain highly positive sentiment rates.

Sentiment Analysis and Viral Trends

Our Sentiment indexes are maintained with live data feed and stabilised in real-time. They are mainly used to indicate what trends are breaking out for specific subjects. As an illustration, a positive index outside the normal bounds for Ashraf Ghani would indicate a positive sentiment outbreak, alongside this we can also pinpoint which topics and where the trend is stemming from. These outbreaks are important because;