Recovering the French Party Space from Twitter Data

This study explores the possibility to retrieve information on partisan polarization from data generated by online social media users. The specific application that we pursue consists in placing a sample of over 1,000 French politicians on a unidimensional left-right scale by using their followers on Twitter as a proxy for their relative ideological positions. The methodology that we use to that end closely replicates that of Barbera (2015), who developed a Bayesian Spatial Following model to retrieve such ideal point estimates in the United States and in five European countries. Our results concur with existing measures of the French party space, and yield additional insights into the behaviour of ideologically extreme social media users.