Statistical Analysis of Factors that Influence Voter Response Using Factor Analysis and Principal Component Analysis

General elections in any country provides an avenue through which citizens exercise their democratic rights in electing leaders of their choice to lead them through a predefined constitutional term in office. Leaders are elected through campaigns in which they demonstrate their intention to lead the populace and they are selected or elected through various modalities that the electorate chooses. The election 2013, for instance provided an avenue through which the electorate will chose six levels of leadership starting from the president, governor, Senator, Mp, Women Rep and County Reps. Before the electorate chose who leads them at whichever level, various factors usually take center stage. These factors range from tribal influence, policies as stipulated in the manifestos, past development record of the contestants etc. This research aims at determining through statistical methods the factors that affect voting patterns and choices that the electorates make. The project will adopt random sampling of the JKUAT community via methods of structured questionnaires in which then respondents filled in each category the basis for their choosing a candidate. After field based questionaring, the research intends to use the respondents' samples so collected and perform analysis on the data frame using statistical analysis of factor analysis which is a technique that is used to reduce a large number of variables into fewer numbers of factors. It is also a mathematical tool which can be used to examine a wide range of data sets. This technique extracts maximum common variance from all variables and puts them into a common score. As an index of all variables, the scores thereof obtained will be used for further analysis. After analysis, the expected results are the grouping of major factors that affect voting patterns through statistical grouping of study variables. The area of study is JKUAT community located in Juja constituency, of Kiambu County.