The Impact of Social Media Appearances During Election Campaigns

With social media services gaining importance in recent years, political institutions are continuously incorporating this development especially during elective campaigns. In the present empirical study, we use the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to conceptualize the level of acceptance of social media appearances. To identify differences when dealing with politically motivated social media appearances, seven hypotheses are derived and tested. We identified the seven most important social media services in Germany and globally and used an adaptive conjoint-analysis to extract 33 major functions of these services. Controlled by four moderators, multiple analyses of variances expose significant differences referring to effects of UTAUT determinants and thereby towards Behavioral Intention as well as Use Behavior. As elections took place in the USA or will be held in the near future in Germany, these results can be the basis to conduct additional transnational comparative studies in a further step.