The paper evaluates the interaction between social media discourse, views of agricultural reform, and policy-specific voting in the electoral process in Nigeria. Based on the secondary data of the Afrobarometer Round 9 survey, the study examines the use of social media content exposure to inform voter perception of agricultural policies and also influence electoral behaviour. The discussion is based on the Spatial Theory of Voting, Agenda-Setting Theory, Framing Theory, and Uses and Gratifications Theory, which are all aimed at explaining the way in which voters process political information and decide to vote. The results show that the social media stories are strongly positively correlated with voter opinion on agricultural reform, with a correlation coefficient of 0.77. This suggests that the greater the exposure to social media content, the stronger and clearer the positions can be that are held regarding agricultural policies. Social media can be used to make complex policy matters easier to understand and present them in formats accessible to voters, thus defining the way in which voters perceive governmental performance and reform agenda. Nevertheless, the research results also indicate that social media accounts have a limited direct effect on policy-specific voting. The results of the regression exercises suggest that the social media accounts account for only a modest percentage of the difference in voting behaviour, and this further underlines the fact that other factors like ethnic identity, party affiliation, and past performance of the government still influence voting behaviour. Although this individual effect is weak, chi-square analysis shows that there is a strong and significant correlation between exposure to social media and support of candidates who advocate agricultural reform. This implies that social media discourse leads to greater trends of political congruency and group-level support, inclusive of individual vote selection. The research finds that the impact of social media on political perception and trends in group voting cannot be overlooked, although the impact of social media on individual voting behaviour is insignificant. The paper emphasizes the increased significance of digital communications in Nigerian elections and demands better policy communication, education of the voters, and additional study of the relations between social media and electoral behaviour.
Kyaagba et al. (Tue,) studied this question.