Social Media and Political Participation in Elections The relation between using Facebook, Telegram and Instagram and Political Participation of Students in Iran’s Parliamentary Elections in 2016

Abstract

The current study examines the effects of the social media, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram on the political participation of the students of Allameh Tabataba’i University in Iran’s Parliamentary Elections in 2016. We used Cochran test and surveyed 370 students from the 8569 people studying on the main campus of the university. The results show that there are significant direct relations between the amount of time spent on the chosen media and the students’ political participation (0.413), trust in the media and the students’ political participation (0.318) and effectiveness in using media and the students’ political participation (0.523). Two other factors including respondents’ education level (-0.401) and age (-0.431) had significant reverse relation with political participation of the students. The results of regression analysis show that five variables including media usage, trust, using effectiveness, educational level and age can predict the students’ political participation by 32 percent.

Keywords

• political participation
• allameh tabataba’i university
• social media
• facebook
• instagram
• telegram