IPS Symposium on Media and Internet Use During General Election 2015

The Institute of Policy Studies conducted a study on media and Internet use during General Election 2015 based on a nation-wide online survey of 2,000 voters. It examined the use of mainstream and social media for the election, trust in the different types of media, political traits of voters, what they did online and offline, and their voting behaviour. The main results were presented during the IPS Post-Election Conference held on 4 November 2015.

This symposium will feature five presentations that will take a detailed and academic look at media use during the election. Four draw on the survey findings and look at: (i) the different types of social media use and their impact on people’s political participation; (ii) the relationship between people’s “personalised sharing” of election information and their political efficacy, interest and knowledge; (iii) the impact of people’s perceptions of others’ opinions on hot-button issues (e.g., population, transportation and housing) on their political engagement and voting behaviour; and (iv) the differences between swing voters and non-swing voters in terms of political traits and media use. The fifth presentation analyses political blogs using human and computer text analysis. The presenters are our collaborators from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication (NTU), the Department of Communications and New Media (NUS), and Singapore Management University.

Please click here to view the programme and synopses.

Downloads

• Report on the IPS Symposium on Media and Internet Use during General Election 2015
• Presentation Slides of Dr Natalie Pang, Explicating Social Media Use: How Expressive, Informational and Relational Uses of Social Media Shape Participation
• Presentation Slides of Dr Debbie Goh, Posted and Shared: Personalised Communication and Knowledge Gap in Singapore's General Election 2015
• Presentation Slides of Dr Elmie Nekmat, Multiple Opinion Climate Indicators: Significance of Offline-Online Opinion Climate Perceptions on Engagement and Voting Behaviour
• Presentation Slides of Associate Professor Zhang Weiyu, Swing Voters vs Non-Swing Voters: Comparing their Demographics, Political Attributes, and Media Usage Patterns
• Presentation Slides of Professor Lim Ee-Peng, Using Text Analytics in Analysing GE2015 Online Content

Media Coverage

• Guanyinmiao. 2016. Questions from the Symposium on internet use during the 2015 General Elections. 1 February
• Berita Harian. 2016. Media social tertutup lebih berpengaruh tentukan calon diundi. 29 January
• 联合早报. 2016. 群众大会是否是票房毒药？. 1月29日
  
• TODAY. 2016. Personal opinion trumped online criticism when it came to GE voting. 29 January
• Channel NewsAsia. 2016. Singapore Tonight: Report on IPS Symposium on media and internet use during General Election 2015. 28 January
• The Independent. 2016. More social media use, but impact on GE2015 uncertain: IPS study. 28 January
• The Middle Ground. 2016. 7 ways social media fooled political experts in GE2015. 28 January
• Yahoo News. 2016. Who swung to the opposition in GE2015? Mostly women: IPS survey. 28 January