Twitter accounts of the candidates in the 2022 German state election of North Rhine-Westphalia

Abstract

The research project SPARTA (Society, Politics and Risk with Twitter Analysis; funded by dtec.bw) monitored the 2022 state election campaign in North Rhine-Westphalia live as it unfolded on Twitter. From April 4 to election day on May 15, 2022, all German-language tweets and retweets related to the election and its central actors were collected and analyzed in real time. The results were published in a nowcasting fashion on the project's WebApp (https://dtecbw.de/sparta/). Among others, we presented the stances expressed toward the main parties and their leading candidates. We also illustrated the salient issues discussed as well as the most frequently used hashtags by the election Twittersphere (e.g., all tweets addressing the election and its central actors), political parties, leading candidates, and candidates for a mandate in the state parliament.

To enable real-time analyses of the election campaign, we created a dataset with the Twitter handles of all candidates for a mandate in the state parliament in March 2022. The dataset contains the Twitter handles and additional information about the candidates of six parties: CDU, SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, FDP, AfD and Die Linke.