International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

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WhatsApp Election in Malaysia: Assessing the Impact of Instant Messaging on Malaysia’s 14th General Election

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Malaysia’s 14th general election, which was held on 9th Mei 2018, become the “the father of all elections” as it evidenced the collapsed of 60 years of Barisan Nasional ruling era. While for Pakatan Harapan, becoming government is beyond their wildest dream, is now a reality. This article aims to identify and explain how social media plays major factor in influencing electorate to make their decision and it is based on the lacked of research conducted in this area. Previous research on voting behavior mainly focusing on ethnicity, party identification, leadership, class analysis, middle class, political cultures and other approaches. But in this article we would like to see different angle of voting behavior by focusing on social media mainly WhatsApp users on how they influence in previous Malaysia 14th General Election. Furthermore, it is evidenced that WhatsApp political and agenda setting contents plays major role as compared to Facebook political and agenda setting content in influencing citizen to change the government as a resulted in the election outcome.
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In-Text Citation: (Nizah & Bakar, 2019)
To Cite this Article: Nizah, M. A. M., & Bakar, A. R. A. (2019). WhatsApp Election in Malaysia: Assessing the Impact of Instant Messaging on Malaysia’s 14th General Election. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 9(3), 132–146.