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THE INFLUENCE OF ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN ON VOTING DECISION IN THE RECENTLY CONCLUDED 2019 OGUN STATE GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION (CASE STUDY OF ABEOKUTA SOUTH RESIDENTS)

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1.      BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

For any democratic system to thrive, it is vital that political parties and candidates provide the electorates with adequate information on party policies, clear cut vision as well as their political agendas to enables the electorates to actively choose their candidates based on full information. To achieve this, political parties use the media in campaigns. Curran (2005:129) adds the media assists the voters to make an informed choice at election time. This is done in form of paid political advertising, social media campaigns, commentaries and new stories. In fact, for an election to be considered free and fair, electorates must have adequate knowledge of the candidates, political parties and election policies.

Recently, political parties and their candidate are becoming increasingly aware of the effectiveness of advertising and its role in getting the electorates to choose a particular candidate or party over the other by the way of informing them. The use of political ad campaigns has become increasingly popular and is very important to the electoral process and voting behaviour because it bridges the communication gap between political parties, political candidates and electorates. Hence, Political parties and candidates all around the world devote a lot of financial resources to political ad campaigns to sell themselves as the preferred brand to the electorates. Interestingly, the most questions raised in elections are concerned with voting behavior i.e why the electorates voted for a candidate over the other and the implication of their choice.

Scholars and communication experts argue that, when the politician crafts his campaign messages as being the fight to improve voter’s lives, or something similar and come with some good measures of integrity, the voters are more likely to believe him (Feyipitan 2015). In other words, the electorates are most likely to trust candidates whose political ad campaign offer to satisfy their basic needs as opposed to those who dwell on their personal achievements. However, these some experts also argue that appearance, personality and language used play crucial roles in political ad campaign. Still many political experts question the efficacy of political ad campaigns in getting the electorates to vote in candidate’s favour.

The recently concluded 2019 gubernatorial elections in Ogun state, witnessed political parties and candidates flooding various forms of

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