  Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in
cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints,
often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of
our social collective behaviour in a quantitative framework. In this
contribution we discuss one such possibility: the monitoring and predicting of
popularity dynamics of candidates and parties through the analysis of socially
generated data on the web during electoral campaigns. Such data offer
considerable possibility for improving our awareness of popularity dynamics.
However they also suffer from significant drawbacks in terms of
representativeness and generalisability. In this paper we discuss potential
ways around such problems, suggesting the nature of different political systems
and contexts might lend differing levels of predictive power to certain types
of data source. We offer an initial exploratory test of these ideas, focussing
on two data streams, Wikipedia page views and Google search queries. On the
basis of this data, we present popularity dynamics from real case examples of
recent elections in three different countries.
