پژوهشهای راهبردی مسائل اجتماعی ایران (Dec 2022)
The Impact of Political Marketing on Participants' Allegiance to Elections via Social Networks through the Lens of Iranian Legislation
Abstract
IntroductionEmergence of social networks has significantly changed not only personal communication, but also the perspective of commercial and political communication around the world. From a political point of view, social networks have a significant impact on the field of political marketing. Thus, leaders, political parties, and politicians increasingly use social networks to inform citizens, communicate with them, and invite them to participate in politics (Vesnic-Alujevic, 2012). The concept of political marketing refers to the use of marketing principles and tools in political campaigns by political parties and leaders that can attract voters’ attention in order to win votes (Newman, 2012). Social networks play a huge role in various forms of political participation, including electoral arenas (Vergeer, 2013). They refer to various online tools that facilitate initiation of conversations and the dissemination of information between users (Kushin & Yamamoto, 2010). They allow users to develop online relationships where people with common interests can interact, and share opinions and knowledge (Steenkamp & Hyde-Clarke, 2014). According to political marketing, social networks can be mentioned as one of the important and influential factors for citizens' political participation in elections (Malherbe, 2015). Citizens have a direct influence on the elections and determination of the country's destiny with their political participation, but no study has yet been conducted on election coverage through social networks, which can have a tremendous impact on the electoral arena. The problem of which networks can be used in the election process depends on the legal, political, and cultural conditions of the country on the one hand and the users who follow different motives, needs, and specific behaviors on the one hand. Therefore, according to what was said and since the purpose of this research was investigating the effect of political marketing through social networks on the participants’ loyalty to elections from the perspective of the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the researchers also looked for an answer to the question of how social networks can affect the election participants’ loyalty through political marketing under the shadow of legal and regulatory institutions. Materials & MethodsThis study was a "descriptive survey of correlation type" in terms of purpose and an "applied" research in terms of data collection method. The unlimited statistical population included the 384 citizens of Kermanshah Province, who were selected via the simple random method (Table 1). From among the questionnaires related to social networks, the questionnaire of Auter and Palmgreen (2000) consisting of 21 questions and that of Tsiotsou (2015) consisting of 4 questions were applied. The questions were localized by the researchers according to the conditions and laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The measurement scale was based on the 5-choice Likert spectrum questions. To confirm the research validity, 3 types of validity (content, convergent, and divergent validities) were used and 3 criteria (factor loading, Cronbach's alpha coefficient, and composite reliability coefficient) were used to confirm its reliability. Discussion of Results & ConclusionsAs it was said, the purpose of this research was to analyze the effect of political marketing on the participants’ loyalty to the elections through social networks and from the perspective of the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The results of the research hypothesis, which was the possible effect of political marketing on the participants’ loyalty in the elections through social networks, showed that social networks had an effect on the participants’ loyalty in the elections from the perspective of the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This finding was consistent with the results obtained by Asplund et al. (2014), Nisar & Whitehead (2016), Dabula (2017), Mahesar et al. (2021), and Hamid et al. (2022). In most studies, social networks was believed to offer great opportunities for leaders and political parties and thus, the power of these networks could be used in the electoral field. This was the reason for the findings of this research to be in line with those of the previous studies. The difference between this study and the previous researches was that none of the studies conducted in this field had any references to the laws of the countries governing the mentioned networks and only measured the relationships between the variables, while the researchers in this research expressed the legal conditions and these social platforms could operate within the framework of the law of the Islamic Republic of Iran besides examining the relationships between the variables.
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