Uncovering the Reasons Behind Abstain Voters' Stances in the 2024 Indonesian Presidential Election: Social Media X Study Cases

Abstract

The Indonesian Government expects the participation of all Indonesian people in holding General Elections. However, according to the 2019 Political Statistics by BPS, there were 34.75 million people who did not exercise their right to vote or were abstain voters (golput) in the 2019 Election. This research aims to analyze individual attitudes towards abstaining voters using stance analysis and topic modelling. From 9,045 collected tweets, subsequent manual annotation revealed 2,566 pro stances, 5,264 neutral stances, and 1,215 contra stances. The classification models utilized are Random Forest, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Gradient Boosting. The classification outcomes will be analyzed by comparing the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score results based on their algorithms and n-grams. The results obtained from the stance analysis show that Random Forest achieved the highest accuracy and precision scores, with values of 84% and 83%, respectively. The discussion topic among those supporting golput due to low trust in the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Other topics mentioned public feels dissatisfied with the pairs of candidates.