Abstract:

Determining campaign theme and the campaign messages depending upon campaign theme is one of the preparation phases of political election campaigns. Effective management of this process is an important step for the success of campaigns. Thus, the following points should be determined for campaign messages as significant ones: election atmosphere, strengths and weaknesses of candidate, strengths and weaknesses of opponent candidate, and socio-demographic characteristics and expectations of the electorate Political election campaign messages can be created according to different strategy or strategies. Some of them are rational, emotional, candidate-centered, and attack message strategies. This paper evaluates perceptions of voters about rational, emotional, candidate-centered, and attack message strategies in the context of a local election. A scale consisting of 28 items was formed and the data obtained was analyzed with a method of exploratory factor analysis. Accordingly, it was concluded that message strategies were able to group in four factors. These factors were named as rational, emotional, candidate-centered, and attack message strategies. In the study, it was seen that rational message strategy was perceived as the most favorable strategy by electorate. Nonetheless, attack message strategy was least supported by voters. However, there is a negative correlation between rational, emotional and candidate-centered message strategies and attack message strategy, but they aren’t significant. In addition, the paper revealed two important findings in terms of socio-demographic factors. First, middle-age voters preferred rational message strategies more than young voters. Second, voters with high level of education generally supported rational message strategies more than voters with low level of education.

Keywords: