IMANI PULSE- EPISODE 04 FEBRUARY 2024: An Analysis of the top Two Election Contenders for 2024 in Ghana

In the run up to the 2024 General Elections, IMANI presents PULSE, a fortnightly curated social media-based sentiment analysis report designed to follow the “pulse” of Ghanaians

The IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election analysis (PULSE) is to determine the sentiment on social media regarding the major political contenders for the election, as well as influential trends and influencers that are shaping social media discourse. The analyses are referenced from the following platforms:

1. Facebook
2. X (formerly, Twitter)
3. YouTube
4. Web
5. TikTok
6. Podcasts
7. Newsfeeds

PULSE monitors primarily the two main contenders, the NPP and the NDC. For this fourth episode of the series, we are adding the sentiments and influence of the other parties, the PNC, CPP, ACP and PPP, as well as independent candidates like the Butterfly Movement, the New Force and other emerging forces on the landscape.

Information is gathered via main keywords. As news themes change, analysis will be done on these keyword associations.

For December 2023 and January 2024, the major keywords used were the following for both major contenders.

For the other contenders, since the flagbearers are not known, keywords used were as follows:

In this iteration, we analyze the buildup to the penultimate State of The Nation (SONA) address of the president by maintaining the keyword below and removing the hashtag #Bawumiaspeaks:

1. #itispossible
Other major events in the period include the ministerial reshuffle which drove a lot of sentiment and comment on social media.

The sentiments are of three values, i.e. positive, negative and neutral. All these are also collated and analyzed to determine the language, tone of comments and tweets, and tone of commentary and posts related to both candidates.

SUMMARY OF REPORT:

• Positive public opinion and sentiment still remains at 10% with a dead tie proportionally between NPP and NDC mentions.
• Public negative sentiment still increases for both, with NPP having an almost 8% jump in negative sentiment.
• There will be another measure of sentiment after the SONA to gauge the public’s response to the SONA.

RESULTS:
The period under observation for this edition of the report is from the 11^th of February to the 26^th of February 2024

POSITIVE SENTIMENT:
Both sentiments of the NDC and NPP took very marginal hits. Interestingly, the results here show a dead even level of sentiment, which means people still feel the same way and positivity is largely unchanged. Both NPP and NDC had exactly 10.22% positive sentiment out of total sentiments analyzed. This further shows that there has not been any compelling event or pronouncement by both candidates that have triggered any upsurge of positivity. Its still early days in the campaigns of both frontrunners, so subsequent observations will be very instructive.

NEGATIVE SENTIMENT:
Purely negative sentiment over the period increased for both party candidates. People that spoke of NPP negatively however had a higher percentage increase from around 21% to just over 28%, representing a 7% increase in negative sentiment against NDC’s approximately 4% increment in negative sentiment for the period under review. The inference here is that generally more people feel negative about both parties, with NPP however having more mentions and more growing negative sentiment.

Events
It seems to be that even though there was a ministerial reshuffle it did not have or carry enough weight to change the level of positivity of NPP, but rather triggered negative sentiments overall. Public faith in politicians will be an interesting phenomenon to look at.

MENTIONS AND REACH
NPP still leads in mentions on social media. While there was the ministerial reshuffle during the period, the gap in mentions and social reach was nevertheless still dominant. The NPP is probably being mentioned more as the ruling party with more social media commentators putting their policies, as well as the current messaging of their presidential candidate under the spotlight, more than they are doing with the candidate of the NDC.

Bawumia’s Social Media Performance vs Previous Period Under Review

The above is a comparison of social media reach, mentions and positive and negative sentiment within the period under review as against the previous period under review for the NPP. This clearly shows the gains made in the period on social media, as well as the significant rise in negative mentions (7% rise) during the period under review.

Mahama’s Social Media Performance vs Previous Period under Review

Mahama’s performance is also compared to for the same period with interesting insights. The most notable is the reduction in negative sentiments over the period by about 8.27%. Candidate Mahama’s reach on non-social media web sources also reduced by 6.78% which is a significant drop.

Its notable however that the number of interactions are growing steadily, however with NDC having more social media mentions and interactions growth than with NPP/Bawumia related user generated content. This means that more proportionally the NDC is slowly growing its audience on social media, albeit at absolute numbers still far less than the NPP.

HEAD-TO-HEAD
Here are some metrics head-to-head for the period under review between the NDC and the NPP in terms of social media presence and performance.

This reflects NPP’s continued dominance of headspace on social media, interactions and discussions.

ASSOCIATED KEYWORDS AND HASHTAGS
Associated Keywords related to the campaigns as a worldcloud have also been gathered. For the purposes of education, this is a set of curated words that are closely associated with and added to posts and comments about the candidates.

For Candidate Mahama, the following are the major keywords:

For Candidate Bawumia, the following are the major keywords:

POPULAR HASHTAGS:
Candidate Mahama’s most associated hashtags:

Candidate Bawumia’s most associated hashtags:

These hashtags are the ones that are most used anytime people post about either candidate, and this has been curated from over 10,000 tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok and YouTube videos, and Instagram posts. More work will be done in gleaning insight from some of these as well as the frequency of their mentions.

GUIDE TO SENTIMENT ANALYSIS:

• Mentions: Number of times the name has been mentioned within the time period
• Social Media Mentions: Number of times the name has been mentioned on social media platforms
• Non-Social Mentions: Number of times the name has been mentioned on other websites
• Estimated Social Media Reach: Estimated number of people that have seen the mentions on social media
• Non-Social Reach: Estimated number of impressions that have seen the mentions on non-social media sites and websites (eg News Websites, etc)
• Social Media Interactions: Total number of interactions generated with comments and threads in social media
• User Generated Content: Total number of interactions generated from mentions on social media and other forums, blogs etc
• Social Media Likes: Number of Likes of social media mentions found
• Videos Incl Tik Tok: Number of videos with mentions of the keywords on Tik Tok
• Positive Mentions: Number of threads/mentions with potentially positive sentiment
• Negative Mentions: Number of threads/mentions with potentially negative sentiment
• AVE: Advertising Value Equivalent: An estimated value of what the total cost will be if all the mentions were paid for.
• Hashtags: a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media sites and applications, especially Twitter, to identify digital content on a specific topic.

SPECIAL MENTIONS AND SEGMENTATION:
Other Contenders:
Here the Social Media Reach of other contenders are examined. Mentions for most of the actors in this space still remain negligible compared to the top two.

The independent hopeful Nana Kwame Bediako still remains the most talked about or dominant in terms of social media attention.

The other contenders still do not have enough data to come up in any analysis as of now.

The list of other contenders are:

• Alan Kyerematen - Butterfly Movement
• Nana Kwame Bediako - New Force Movement
• People's National Convention (PNC)
• Convention People's Party (CPP)
• Hassan Ayariga - All People's Congress
• Progressive People’s Party (PPP)

Please see graphical representation of the data @

IMANI PULSE EPISODE 04 FEBRUARY 2024: An Analysis of the top 2 Election Contenders for 2024 in Ghana | Flourish