Political Information Efficacy And Sense-Making Process: “Structural Equation Modelling” (Sem) Approach

Abstract

By delivering useful facts to the target demographic, political ads play a major role during election campaigns. The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of political ads on the effectiveness of political knowledge among young voters. To consider youth voters segment, Kaid developed the idea of political information efficacy; participation in the electoral process. Meanwhile, at the same point, the engagement of young voters in the democratic process has become an important topic for the communication scholars to understand the influence of mass media toward young voters, especially in developing countries such as Malaysia. This research, therefore, analysed the impact of political ads on 374 young voters in DUN Kota Damansara, in order to understand their political knowledge effectiveness by concentrating on the internal efficacy component and the decision-making phase. Additionally, the data was analysed by PLS-SEM to build a structural model of the study. Latent variables were constructed based on the literature reviews identified such as: (1) political information efficacy, (2) information needs, (3) information use, (4) political disaffection/gap and (5) voting decision. The findings find that political information efficacy can be a strong predictor.