CHANGE IS PAINFUL: VISIBILITY AND TONE OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA AND ITS IMPACT ON CHANGE IN VOTING PREFERENCES

Now a day during general elections, citizens changing their party preferences have been increasing in nature. Researcher tries to analyze the factors that ignite the change in voting preferences of voters, while focusing on the visibility and tone of communication that was presented by both political parties and politicians in various social media platforms. Researcher conducted a thorough analysis on an integrative data approach, linking data from analyzing the content in social media to public opinion data. This enabled to investigate the relative impact of political party communication and its influence in change in party preferences. The findings reveal that political campaigns matter, however, especially in case of political party canvassing, visibility and tone of posts that are related to politics in social media has its impact on the likelihood of voters to change their voting preferences in favor of the respective party whose visibility and tone are positive in nature.