This book examines the role of social media in shaping candidate images and its impact on voter attitudes and voting intentions in Indonesian elections. The book uses the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework to explore how external stimuli, such as social media information and candidate images, affect voters’ internal processes. It focuses particularly on how these stimuli shape attitudes that drive voting intentions. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are highlighted as important tools for political engagement. Candidates like Prabowo Subianto and Ganjar Pranowo effectively utilized these platforms to enhance their appeal among younger voters, especially millennials and Gen Z. The book also emphasizes the significance of personal appeal, especially charm, as a key factor in shaping positive voter attitudes. While social media information is shown to have a strong influence, the book addresses the challenges posed by biased or misleading information. It also reveals that there are no significant differences between science and non-science students in how they form attitudes toward candidates, suggesting that candidate image and social media content resonate broadly across different demographic groups. This book provides insights into the growing role of social media in shaping political campaigns in the digital age.

This edited volume is based on a highly original survey carried out between November 2011 and June 2012 among a panel of 6,000 voters. The panel was interviewed on 12 separate occasions about how and why they made their voting choices. The book focuses on how electoral choices are made and how these choices evolve during the short time-span of an election campaign. The analysis of the 2012 electoral result shows more than ever that voting choices are the fruit of interweaving timelines: the long term period that characterizes voters’ predispositions and their predictions of a possible scenario; the shorter period of time during which the campaign unfolds where those predispositions are either confirmed, called into question, or undone; and the moment when the final choice is made. This is the first time the electoral decision-making process during a French Presidential election has been systematically studied.

Was the 1959 UK General Election the first television election? Could television be used to create a Party ‘image’? Television and the Political Image (1961) provides answers to both these questions. It surveys two constituencies, interviewing the same cross-section of electors before and after the election campaign, and analyses and compares the campaigns as conducted by television, radio, the Press, and through the work of the local Parties. Various effects of the political barrage are measured and attributed to their sources; such effects include changes in voting intention during the course of the election campaign, changes in attitudes to Parties and their leaders, and changes in what the voter knows of the parties’ policies.

This volume represents one of the first major scholarly effort to unravel the psychological and symbolic processing of political advertising. Utilizing survey, experimental, qualitative, and semiotic methodologies to study this phenomenon, the contributors to Television and Political Advertising trace how political ads help to interpret the psychological reality of the presidential campaign in the minds of millions of voters. A product of the National Political Advertising Research Project, this interdisciplinary effort is valuable to researchers in advertising, communication, and consumer psychology since it helps define future work on the relationship between television, politics, and the mind of the voter. This volume, Television and Political Advertising: Psychological Processes, is the first of two, and covers such topics as Models and Theories for Viewing Political Television; Psychological Processing of Issues, Images, and Form; Differential Processing of Positive and Negative Advertising; and The Psychological Contexts of Processing.

The rapid development of democracy and political freedoms has created new and sophisticated psychology-based methods of influencing the way voters choose, as well as political systems based on free market principles. A Cross-Cultural Theory of Voter Behavior uses advanced empirical testing to determine whether the behavior of voters in established and emerging democracies around the world is predictable. The results of the testing suggest the theory is a ground-breaking cross-cultural model with theoretical and strategic global implications. This unique book examines the many facets of political marketing and its direct relationship with the voter. A comprehensive theory meticulously tested in the dynamic political waters of the U.S. and Europe, this text bridges the latest theoretical developments in the emerging and advanced democracies. A Cross-Cultural Theory of Voter Behavior offers an innovative and seldom seen international perspective that integrates up-to-date literature in political science with advanced political marketing to provide readers with useable, unified information. In addition, the text is replete with detailed references and illustrated with a wealth of informative tables and graphics to made pertinent data accessible and easily understood. Some of the topics discussed in A Cross-Cultural Theory of Voter Behavior include politics in an age of manufactured images, partisanship and party identification, candidate-centered politics, political cognition, social categorization of politicians, the role of advertising and emotion, among others. An ideal text for students, academics, and researchers, the information presented in A Cross-Cultural Theory of Voter Behavior is also a vital resource for political practitioners such as consultants, candidates, lobbyists, political action committees, fund-raisers, pollsters, government officials, ad specialists, journalists, public relations executives, and congressional aides.

This is the first integrated theory-to-practice text on marketing's role in the political process. It

When survey research, statistics, and electronic data processing were first introduced, they held out promise that a new level of political knowledge would be created. Applied to the study of voting behavior, survey research promised an understanding of the factors determining the outcome of an election, that political history could be based on rich and current data, and that we could begin to understand the role of elections in constitutional democracy. The truth as Peter B. Natchez shows, is that despite the opportunity provided by this revolution, voting studies have failed to make significant contributions to democratic theory or political history.The findings of voting studies have spread from the universities into the political system with a rather grim message. In its simplest form the message is this: the electorate does not measure up to the task thrust upon it by democracy. The studies conclude that voters choose candidates for reasons having little relevance to the success of the political system, and little relevance even to politics. Thus political science, in shifting from an optimistic focus on theory to a strong emphasis on empiricism, became a source of pessimism.One cannot study democracy or the democratic process without a point of view on democracy. The scientific method requires a point of view: science is not only a method for discovering reality, but for addressing well-structured questions. Natchez identifies goals for democracy, freedom and tolerance, and consciousness in decision making. Elections serve two functions; one, filling constitutional offices, and two, a symbolic function rooted in democratic experience that is more ambiguous, but no less vital as a part of regime analysis. A political science that connects these two aspects of voting will require an analysis of why voters vote the way they do to fill offices; but, more importantly, it will also require an understanding of the symbolic function of elections.