Keyword

Political Socialization Process, Opinion Leader, Voting Behavior, Community Agents, Pakistan.

Abstract

In political system, voters belong to diverse nature of communities. These communities have their own particular set of voting behaviors that emerged out from an ongoing social-interaction process. Similarly, their voting intentions are the outcome of their participation in social networks and learning from community’s socialization process. Where, social agents play very significant and influential contribution in shaping the community’s overall voting behavior. These social agents influence and are influenced by the community members during the process. This research begins to address the opinion leading role of opinion leaders in community’s overall voting behaviors and in political brand building at constituency level. This is done by conceptualizing a socialization process model that is empirically evaluated by surveying and collecting 550 valid responses from registered voters of selected constituency. A carefully designed questionnaire was used to collect the empirical data from the respondents. The structural equation modeling technique was employed to analyze the possible relationship between the different constructs of the conceptualized model. Study in hand concludes that opinion leaders play very important role in convincing and wining the voters for a particular political party through provision of relevant information, brand advocacy and powerful word-of-mouth within their electoral communities. Furthermore, they exert high social pressure on political par


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