More Than Politics: How Personality Trait and Media Technology Use Affect Vote Likelihood During the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

Considerable work has been devoted to studying voter behavior in U.S. presidential elections by analyzing their political participation and attitude toward political advertising. Less is known about how other factors may alter voter behavior like personality traits and use of information and communication technology (ICT). This study analyzes vote likelihood among American young voters and their parents ( N = 674) after they watched four presidential campaign commercials . It proposes a hierarchical mediation model highlighting the need for cognition (NFC) impact on vote likelihood through the mediation of power use of ICT applications, political participation and trust in negative advertising. This study has revealed both the direct effect of NFC on vote likelihood, and the indirect relationship between NFC and vote likelihood that is mediated by power use of ICT applications. The findings should enrich the literature of vote likelihood by highlighting the effects of need for cognition and ICT usage.

The Arab Spring a decade on: information and communication technologies as a mass mobilization tool

“…The issue of the impact of ICTs on political processes is addressed by Margolis et al (1997), Abbott (2001), Norris (2001), Meikle (2002), Kalathil and Boas (2003), Russell (2001Russell ( , 2005, Pedersen and Saglie (2005), Welch et al (2005), Tolbert and Mossberger (2006), Diebert (2008), Howard and Mazaheri (2009), Howard (2010), Sreberny and Khiabany (2010), Earl and Kimport (2011), Nisbet et al (2012), Howard and Parks (2012), Kamp (2016), Obiani et al (2016), Scaramuzzino and Scaramuzzino (2017), Emmer and Kunst (2018), Asongu and Nwachukwu (2019), Bannister and Connolly (2018), Mukhtarov et al (2018), Capano and Pavan (2019), Visvizi and Lytras (2019) and European Parliamentary Research Service (2019). Many researchers assess the impact of ICTs on citizens' participation in the institutionalized political processes such as voting (Bryan et al, 1998;Oates, 2003;Gentzkow, 2006;Shirazi, 2008;Falck et al, 2014;Gonz alez-Arriaga, 2015;Kreiss and Jasinski, 2016;Garzia et al, 2017;Bene, 2018;Garnett and James, 2020;Haque and Carroll, 2020;Zhong et al, 2021).…”