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The Impact of Social Media Political Activists on Voting Patterns

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Abstract

This paper investigates how social media affects general voting patterns. Unlike previous studies investigating whether citizens’ use of social media affects political participation, this paper considers the connections that social media users have with political activists on social media, and how this connectedness influences general voting patterns, using data from Ghana. With contemporary theoretical perspectives and exploratory techniques, trends from past literature are presented, from a social media-based propagated survey with 420 valid responses. Structural equation modeling was used to test the conceptual model, which demonstrates that the connectedness with political and social media activists is significant and positively influences modifications in voting patterns. Online political participation and political affect also present an effect on voting patterns. The relationship between connections with social media political activists and online political participation is significant, as indicated by a strong covariance observed in the model. The results of the multigroup analysis also indicate some cultural and social issues to shape the phenomena for further investigation.

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Notes

  1. Code Availability: All dataset needed to replicate the analyses in this paper are available at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/QJLGNO or https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QJLGNO.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Director of International Students’ office, Sherry Ruichen SHEN, of the School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), and all respondents of the study. We thank the Editors-in-Chief and Co-Editors, including all the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank the Center for West African Studies, UESTC, for their support.

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  1. School of Management and Economics, Center for West African Studies, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, No. 2006, Xiyuan Ave, West Hi-Tech Zone, Chengdu, 611731, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China

    Adasa Nkrumah Kofi Frimpong & Ping Li

  2. University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Xiyuan Road 2006, Xiyuan Road, Pixian County, Xiyuan Avenue, High-Tech District, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

    Gabriel Nyame & Md Altab Hossin

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  1. Adasa Nkrumah Kofi Frimpong
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  2. Ping Li
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  3. Gabriel Nyame
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  4. Md Altab Hossin
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Correspondence to Adasa Nkrumah Kofi Frimpong.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 9 , 10, 11 and Figs. 9 and 10 .

Table 9 Measurement model reliability indexes and other descriptive statistics
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Table 10 Uni- and multivariate normality assessment
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Table 11 Non-parametric analysis for comparing gender influence on the latent variable scores
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Fig. 9
figure 9

Model specification for structural equation modeling

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Fig. 10
figure 10figure 10

Normality test of data

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Kofi Frimpong, A.N., Li, P., Nyame, G. et al. The Impact of Social Media Political Activists on Voting Patterns. Polit Behav 44, 599–652 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09632-3

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