Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Arab countries are going through democratic and political transformations that we have not witnessed over the past few decades. More people from Arab countries are becoming more active politically and people are becoming more involved in the political process such as voting and elections. We are seeing polls that are showing a more than 50 per cent voting participation in many countries where voting rarely surpassed 20 per cent. This phenomenon triggered the authors to better understand what are the underlying causes of this change and get a deeper understanding of the reasons for voting intentions.
The interest to pursue this research topic stems from the effect of the Arab Spring that took place in 2011 on many nations in the Arab and Islamic worlds. What is clear from the revolutions and demonstrations that took place in countries such as: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya is that there is a clear rise in the influence of Islam on politics. There is a significant rise in political parties who market their ideas through religion as their main proposition. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists have clearly made center stage and have a clear role in politics. From here the interest arose to better understand factors underlying voting intentions for voters in the Egyptian parliament election 2011 and the role of the media during the elections given the inclusion of religious beliefs and the influence of family and friends as important factors affecting Egyptian voters. More specifically, the authors focused on the following research questions:
RQ1. What are the factors that influence people's decision to vote?
RQ2. To what extent does religious beliefs influence people's decision to vote?
RQ3. Does the media have any role in shaping people's voting intentions?
Literature review
There has been an increased application of marketing in modern politics and political marketing is now in the mainstream of research in marketing ([15] Harris and Lock, 2010). [23] Kelley (1956) first defined the term of political marketing through commenting on the activities of the first election consultancies in the USA. [23] Kelley (1956, p. 53) wrote:
The team relies heavily but not entirely upon their own intuitive feel for providing political marketing conditions. They pride themselves on having "good average minds"...