The influence of social media political communication content on voting behavior of the young generation

Abstract

Currently, the intention of use social media is drastically different from the use of social media in past. In 2015 Sri Lankan presidential election, a large-scale political communication campaign was conducted through social media, and its role is highly emphasized by politicians and supporters. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of social media political communication content on the voting behavior of young voters. The population of this study was young voters who use social media and data were collected through online distributed self-administrated structured questionnaire. The study was conducted by selecting 120 young voters based on convenience sampling method. Social media political communication content was the independent variable whereas dependent variable was voting behavior. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and regression analysis were applied to analyze the data by employing SPSS 21.0. The results of the correlation analysis and regression analysis showed significant positive relationship between the independent and dependent variable. Findings of the research emphasize that social media has great power to influence voters’ behavior as a communication tool in the political context of Sri Lanka.