The Impact Of Social Media On Voting Realignment In Ghana

There exists a large pool of information on the political use of social media.Past theoretical literature examined some relationships extensively,including the impact of the social media landscape in political communication,civic engagement,political polarization,political participation,perceived political benefits and challenges,and political affect and participation.What appears to be missing in the existing literature is the linkage to voting realignments.This study attempts to solidify the causal impact of social media political activists on people's general voting realignments,using data from Ghana,how SM influences the switching of voter preference from one party to another in a process called realignment.The sudden change in voters' preferences in favor of a more preferred political party and against a less preferred one is influenced by changes in ideologies,national policies,leadership,systems,and political structures.It considers the dynamics of political participation vis-à-vis SM as "the elixir of life for democracy."The underlying assumption is that both ethnicity and voters' depth of attachment to a particular political party influences the degree of swing and hardcore voters.However,variables in the Ghanaian perspective have been extensively studied by other researchers.Considering these as primary predictors of voting behavior in Ghana,other determinants evolve from these predictors.This suggests that interconnectedness between people and political activists via SM,political affect,online political participation,offline political participation,political disposition,and voting Patterns remain critical to this study.The study offers a process-oriented approach,using the five-level QDA methodology,to provide a strategy aimed at addressing the linguistic,methodological,conceptual,and ontological challenges of literature review(LR).The study shows the relationship between the emergent mindset,the strategy level of LR,and the algorithmic mindset,at the tactics level,and how to heuristically translate between them.We introduce the codebook concept to solve the literature review's methodological and organizational problems,link the analysis in a QDA,the bibliographical information in a reference management software,and the word processor's actual review.We analysed the challenges of writing a literature review from published articles and collected data from postgraduate students in China.The study,therefore,takes contemporary theoretical perspectives and exploratory techniques using the five-level QDA and the learning heuristics of past literature.We match the units of analytical tasks of literature review(at the strategy level)to their selected and constructed components(at the tactics level)to reveal trends from past literature.The population of the study is all registered voters in Ghana.From a social media-based propagated survey,we collected 420 valid responses.Structural equation modeling(SEM)was used to test the conceptual model.The study applied the covariance-based SEM(CB-SEM)and conducted(using Maximum Likelihood with 2000 samples)bootstrapping in IBM SPSS Amos 24 and IBM SPSS Statistic 25.The findings show that SM has indeed helped overcome the difficulties inherent in traditional offline participation,such as costs and time-related to the use of physical brick-and-mortar halls,thus making participation more appealing.People with higher online political participation and political affect support economic development rather than solely keeping national identity,and therefore are more open to participation and change in voting realignment.Our interpretation is that,indeed,SM's positive effect applies to voter turnout and significant positive reinforcement towards switching people's voting realignments.The optimistic,normalizers,but not the pessimistic theories are further supported.We find that connections with social media political activists cause voting realignment change by a significant 64%.As people become enlightened,they can discern better.They are,therefore,in an excellent position to switch their political preferences.Our results side with the optimist view that SM has a catalytic effect towards encouraging more people to participate in politics,and the normalizer view,that SM provides strong political reinforcement towards enhancing the interest of people who are already interested in politics.We did not find any evidence to support a moderator effect of political affect,political disposition,and time online on the influence of people's connections with social media political activists on voting realignments.The multi-group analysis results also enable some cultural and social issues to shape the phenomena for further investigation.