Title: Analysis of Political Party Twitter Accounts' Retweeters During Japan's 2017 Election,
Abstract: In modern election campaigns, political parties utilize social media to
advertise their policies and candidates and to communicate to the electorate.
In Japan's latest general election in 2017, the 48th general election for the
Lower House, social media, especially Twitter, was actively used. In this
paper, we analyze the users who retweeted tweets of political parties on
Twitter during the election. Our aim is to clarify what kinds of users are
diffusing (retweeting) tweets of political parties. The results indicate that
the characteristics of retweeters of the largest ruling party (Liberal
Democratic Party of Japan) and the largest opposition party (The Constitutional
Democratic Party of Japan) were similar, even though the retweeters did not
overlap each other. We also found that a particular opposition party (Japanese
Communist Party) had quite different characteristics from other political
parties.