Impact of Social Media on Political Efficacy and Vote Intention: A Case of Educated Youth

Abstract

The present study investigates the impact of social media on political efficacy and vote intention in university of Gujrat. In this study, a structured questionnaire was used to collect the data by targeting those 320 Master and B.S students who have maintained at least one personal profile on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, MySpace or any other social networking sites. These respondents were taken through using purposive sampling technique. In analytical portion, independent sample t-test, Pearson correlation, and Kendall’s tau b-c were used to test the hypothesis of current study. It is found that the majority of the respondents agreed that social media has a very strong impact in developing, modifying and changing the political affiliation and ultimately vote casting intention. Results of the present study have also highlighted that males have more political efficacy as compared to females (male=56.39 and female=52.84). However, there is no or very little impact of the family system (nucleus =55.21 and joint=54.82) and area of residence (urban=55.49 and rural=54.50) upon the political efficacy and vote casting. Moreover, it is investigated that the majority of the respondents (mean vaule is 55.56) have used their right and cast their vote in the recent elections 2013. According to Pearson Correlation and Kendall tau b-c's results, political efficacy (p-value: 0.00) is affecting vote casting status of the respondents.