DIGITAL DEMOCRACY AND ELECTORAL CHANGE: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN PAKISTAN’S 2018 GENERAL ELECTIONS

Abstract

This paper has discussed the importance of social media sites in voter turnout and voter mobilization in the 2018 general elections in Pakistan with reference to youth voters and urban voters. This paper had intended to dwell on how the digital media has transformed the manner in which political communication has been undertaken, how it has contributed towards the level of voter turnout as well as how it has rejuvenated the democracy issue in Pakistan. The mixed method was the research design. Voter surveys were conducted so as to establish the trends between social media and voting with the qualitative data being collected as the semi-structured interviews with the key informants whose views included academicians and journalists. The Digital Democracies Theory and the Participatory Communication Theory were the theory frameworks. Voter surveys, statistics provided by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), and the literature available were used as different sources of data collection. Thematic analysis and descriptive and inferential statistics were also conducted to interpret qualitative data and analyze the answers of the survey respectively. The findings state that the youth became more political with the use of social media and were more aware. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, among other platforms, have proved significant today where voters informed themselves, communicated with the campaigns and interacted in real time. Political campaigns, influencers, hashtags, live stream campaigns proved to be a successful means of reaching the youth and urban voters, which were also actively used by political parties, especially by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). The study also found out that there were severe discrepancies in digital practices: youth in rural areas, women, and less educated citizens were still marginalized by the absence of access to the internet, the degree of digital literacy, and biased social cultures. The research paper aids in understanding some of the peculiarities of digital political behaviour in developing democracies by disclosing that the social media promotes the transparency simultaneously with exposing the digital divide and gender disparity in political participation.