트위터에서 선거여론 확산구조 예측 －10.26 서울시장 재보선을 중심으로

Abstract

The by-election for Seoul mayor on Oct 26 can be called a case that showed the possibility of active participation in politics through social network services in the history of Korean politics. In particular, the level of political participation at Twitter is emerging as an important tool that can predict the public opinion supplementing the existing opinion polls. This study conducted a research on the universality and structure of public opinion with Kyoungwon Na and Wonsoon Park who are the representative candidates of the by-election for Seoul mayor on Oct 26 as the subject by applying the network theories to the possibility of the method that can grasp the public opinion on elections and politics and predict the directions through Twitter following the flow of times. As a result, the public opinion on the election at Twitter this time was following the power law among the network theories, and this became the grounds for the structure with universality. However, Kyoungwon Na had hierarchy in scales but had no universality. The public opinion with big value of page rank at Twitter showed a trend to be critical to Kyoungwon Na, and thus she had greater hierarchical structure than Wonsoon Park who showed a tendency to encourage political discussions or voting but showed a structure that cannot secure the systemicity of public opinion as much as Wonsoon Park. That is, while the public opinion for Wonsoon Park had organizational universality, the public opinion for Kyoungwon Na did not. In addition, both candidates had hierarchy with strong delivery capability in public opinion, but while the meaning of delivery of Wonsoon Park was positive, Kyoungwon Na was spread through the delivery capability on negative public opinion. Therefore, the structural changes that can predict the directions of public opinion with delivery capability following the changes of classes and scales for each period was known through the case of by-election for Seoul mayor on Oct 26, and the tendency of universality that shows the systemicity and cohesiveness of a specific public opinion at Twitter could be known through the power law, which is a network theory, and page rank.