Social Networking Site and Local Election in Taiwan: A Case Study of 2010 Kaohsiung City Mayoral Candidate Chen Chu's Facebook Page Management
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Kao, Min-Lin
Abstract
The rise of a new media – the Internet – has influenced the mode of communication in human society for over nearly half a century, the spread and the development of the Internet is gradually replacing the traditional mass media. In the generation of Web 2.0, social networking site, Facebook, has developed so rapidly and has become an important media for interpersonal interaction and a crucial tool for marketing in various fields and different industries. In the 2008 United States presidential election, one of Barack Obama’s campaigning strategies was to use Facebook for political communication throughout the election. Obama’s successful use of Internet has now become the most popular case for other campaigning teams around the world to imitate.
This research is a case study of Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Chen Chu''s Facebook fan page, "Chen Chu (Hua-ma) the mayor." The study analyzes the web campaigning strategy and the content of political communication; the study also investigates the "communication circumstances" that would easily evoke fans’ feedback or would affect fans’ psychological identity, their voting tendency and behavior. Moreover, this research evaluates the effectiveness of using Facebook within the web campaign by analyzing fan’s assessment of the communication circumstance, their identity and voting behavior. According to the study framework of this thesis, the communication circumstance of Facebook is viewed as an independent variable, fans’ identity as a mediator, and the fans’ voting behavior as a dependent variable. Factors that may also affect voting behavior, such as age, gender, political party preference, are regarded as moderators. Besides, descriptive statistics and bootstrapping is used for further analysis.
It is founded for this thesis that the use of Facebook for campaigning communication has a significant effect for fans’ voting behavior. The more a candidate uses Facebook for propagation, the more response feedback are generated form fans; when the fans have more positive feedback on communication circumstance and the candidate, their attitude and psychological identity are more positive as well. Simultaneously, fans are more inclined to vote for that candidate. According to this research, using Facebook for political communication is beneficial for constructing and strengthening fans’ recognition and psychological identity, and also for catalyzing and affecting their voting behavior.
Subjects
Facebook
social networking site
web campaign
political communication
political marketing
voting behavior
Kaohsiung city mayoral election
Type
thesis
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