INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE VOTING DECISION OF RESIDENTS OF ABOH MBAISE IMO STATE

1.1 Introduction

The election and nomination of candidates into various political offices are important in party politics and representative democracy. In every political party, such nominations are made at national and state conventions preceding the presidential, gubernatorial, and other local elections (Achor and Moguluwa, 2012). Securing a party’s candidature is a hurdle that must be passed using intra-party connections, personal contacts, and aspirant’s credentials or achievements. After securing a party’s candidacy, the candidate and the political party have an uphill task to winning during general elections (Achor, 2011).

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Research hypothesis and questions, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.

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1.2 Background of Study

Political campaign (i.e. electioneering and voter mobilization campaigns), the voters are influenced through various political marketing strategies and programmes. The array of political marketing strategies provides information which voters need to assess candidate’s capability in satisfying their needs. The contents of the campaign blue-print are the expressions of candidate’s objectives for seeking votes from the electorate (Owuamalam, 2014).Prior to the 2015 gubernatorial election in Imo state, the two prominent gubernatorial candidates (Owelle Rochas Okorocha and Emeka Ihedioha) massively employed political marketing strategies. These were employed to woo voters or persuade them to vote candidate of their choice or political party. One prominent strategy adopted by the two guber-candidates was political advertising, which is a kind of advertising specifically directed to the electorate to persuade them to vote for or against a candidate. Political advertising was massively employed since there is no known cutting edge strategy that can win all the time, given the political terrain in Nigeria and particularly in Imo State where competition is stiff.

The polity was unduly heated while the electorate was divided due to issues and negative propaganda strategies that were used by both the opposition and incumbent political party to sway public opinion to their favour. To be able to holistically influence voters, different forms of political advertising which anchored on different unique selling propositions (USPs) were used. The implication is that political messages must be anchored around a specific issue, which explains why a candidate should be preferred to others in an election (Owuamalam, 2014). Although scholars and practitioners alike agree that political advertising is important for every election campaign, there seems to be no agreement on the effects of political advertising on electoral outcomes or choice of candidate for election. Based on the above issues raised or scenarios, this study aimed at empirically studying the effects of various political advertising strategies used by two notable gubernatorial candidates (Rochas Okorocha and Emeka Ihedioha) in the 2015 guber elections in Imo State on voters.

Therefore, in Aboh Mbaise, Imo State where the research was carried out, the activities that was conducted is to know the Influence of Social Media on the Voting Decision of Residents of Aboh Mbaise Imo State in the 2019 General Election.

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1.3 Statement of Problem

The 2019 elections must have come and gone but the experience still remains fresh with us. The All Progressive congress (APC) candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari re-contested for the presidential seat and was fiercely opposed by the candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. Both were popular in the contest as the both had millions of followers and supporters. However, the candidate of the APC was declared winner at the end of the day. Looking at the elections, many factors played out during the elections, one of such is the role played by the social media. The rivers state governorship election was conducted and the INEC declared it inconclusively, the social media also played a significant role. The fact here is that the electorates who are mostly internet users are glued to the social media platforms for information. Through the social media platforms news are disseminated, whether fake or real. In this study our focus is to appraise the perception of Port Harcourt residents of the 2019 election result as conveyed by the social media.

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1.4 Aim and Objectives of Study

The aim of the study is to scrutinize the Influence of Social Media on the Voting Decision of Residents of Aboh Mbaise Imo State in the 2019 General Election. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows:

1. To determine the extent social media influenced voters’ choice of political candidates during the 2019 General Election.
2. To determine if the popularity of electoral candidates during the 2019 General Election influenced by their social media usage.
3. To determine the extent social media influence voting pattern of electorate during the 2019 General Election.

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1.5 Research Questions

The study came up with research questions so as to be able to ascertain the above stated objectives. The specific research questions for the study are stated below as follows:

• To what extent did social media influence voters’ choice of political candidates during the 2019 General Election?
• Was the popularity of presidential candidates during the 2019 General Election influenced by their social media usage?
• To what extent did social media influence voting pattern of electorate during the 2019 General Election?

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1.6 Research Hypothesis

In order to pursue the objective of this study, the following generalized statements have been designed to guide and aids in obtaining the result for the experiment to be conducted. For this work, the null hypothesis will be represented with H0 while the alternative hypothesis will be represented with hypothesis H1.

• H₀1: Voter’s choice of political candidates in the 2019 General Election was not influenced by political communication on social media.
• H₀2: The popularity of Electoral aspirants in the 2019 general election has no significant relationship with their social media use during the election.
• H₀3: Electorate voting pattern during the 2019 elections was not influenced by their exposure to political messages on social media.

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1.7 Significance of Study

This study will help expose the gaps that were encountered during the process that was not properly addressed. Aboh Mbaise, Imo State residents are not new to social media as a good number of them make up the Nigeria internet users’ statistics. This study will help the social media analyst to understand the perception of Aboh Mbaise, Imo State residents concerning the 2019 elections. It will prove to the parties that the electorates are fully aware of what is happening in the polity. Furthermore, the study will help for comparison purposes as the residents of other cities can compare their perception to the Aboh Mbaise, Imo State residents in order to reach a statistically significant conclusion.

This study will be of immense benefit to other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.

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1.8 Scope of Study

The study focuses on the Access, Perception and Influence of Social Media on the Voting Decision of Residents of Aboh Mbaise Imo State in the 2019 General Election.

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1.9 Limitations of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
3. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
4. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet, questionnaire and interview).