Voters' Involvement, Attitude, and Confidence in the Era of New Media

Social network sites have now become one of the important media channels for election campaigns. Researches in the domain of social sciences are starting to form a picture of how social network site itself might affect political participation. However, there has not been much attention given to the influence of the determinants of social network site usage on voters' involvement and their attitude and confidence. Thus, this research extends the concept of previous research and aims to examine the relationship between the determinants of social network site usage, voters' involvement with politics, voters' attitude toward voting, and their confidence of voting decision. This research uses a mediation regression model to run a Likert scaled dataset from 211 questionnaires. The results of this research show that the three determinants of social network site usage have positive impact on voters' involvement with politics, which further affects voters' attitude toward voting and their confidence of decisions. More specifically, social network site users' 'need to belong' and their 'perceived ease of use' towards the sites significantly increase their involvement with politics and further enhance their attitude toward voting and their confidence of voting decisions. This research has several contributions in the field of academic and management. First, it provides a framework to explain the impact of social network sites usage on voters' attitude and confidence. Second, it provides an empirical support for using actual data from actual social network site users. Third, the findings of this research indicate that when intending to strengthen voters' attitude toward voting in order to enhance voting rate or to raise voters' confidence of their voting decisions on a specific candidate or party, political campaign managers and candidates are suggested to take into account users' feel of belongings in a certain online community and their perceived effort when using a certain social network site.

Hang Lee