Mobile App Consumption and Political Orientation

Abstract

Elections are a cornerstone of democratic societies, and their outcome has important implications on the lives of citizens and on the interior and foreign politics of a country. Understanding biases in the political orientation of the electorate plays a key role in assessing the health of the voting process and the reasons underlying the preferences of voters. Traditionally, political orientation has been studied through the lenses of the socioeconomic status of voters, i.e., their education level, type of occupation, wealth, or age. In this work, we take an original perspective and factor in mobile app usage as a different yet primary indicator of the vote decision. To this end, we explore the relationship between the 2019 European parliamentary election results in approximately 4,000 urban communes in France and the associated consumption of a wide range of mobile services. Our results show how app usage provides complementary information to the socioeconomic status and can feed a Dirichlet regression that is up to 21% more accurate in predicting the multiparty election outcome.