Empirical Scrutiny of the Usage and Impact of Facebook on the Electoral Process in India : A Concept of the State o f Punjab

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of the increasing use of Social Media and its participation during the electoral voting in India with context to Punjab. Besides that, to understand the meaning and impact of especially Facebook on elections, we take survey results collected from different people in Punjab and Facebook data related to different political parties. There are numerous challenges when it comes to engaging people during political campaigns. The current findings in literature show us that previous efforts to involve public participation with prior media tools did not meet the full expectations. With Social Media’s indulgence this could change, because engagementof people seems to be the major concept that explains the difference between the impact of old media and ‘new’ Social Media. The survey explains that Social Media seemed to significantly influence voting behavior during the last general elections (2014). And, during the elections (2019) too, politicians with higher Social Media engagement are expecting relatively more votes within most political parties and banking upon Facebook practices. To conclude, we hereby propose a future research framework which studies how political parties take benefit from Facebook to contrive and convalesce the methodologies they follow with their party members, volunteers and general public.