The Facebook Formula: An experimental study into which electioneering strategies used over Facebook are most effective at influencing the Australian youth vote.

Abstract

Facebook is rapidly changing Australia’s political media landscape. Young voters’ growing reliance on Facebook for the consumption of political news has corresponded with politicians’ increasingly prudent use of social media; suggesting that Facebook will play a defining role as an influential political arena to access future generations of voters. It is therefore important for electioneers and political scientists to understand which electioneering strategies used over Facebook are the most effective at influencing the Australian youth vote. This thesis takes a post-positivist approach to research to examine this causal relationship; using the experimental method to isolate and test the effects of extant online electioneering strategies on the voting habits of young Australians. It employs web-based crowdsourcing services to recruit participants into the experiments, and in doing so encounters sample size problems which prevent it from drawing conclusions against hypotheses. While the thesis is unable to evaluate the causal relationship between online electioneering strategies and youth voting habits, by learning from the sampling issues encountered in the study it makes an important contribution towards our understanding of experiments in Australian political science. Additionally, considering problems in the study were caused by sampling issues rather than the methodological design, the thesis is able to offer a robust methodology for future post-positivist research into this area.