engleski

DEVELOPING DEMOCRACY WITH POLITICAL MARKETING – THE ROLE OF PERCEIVED POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

Citizens' political participation represents one of the main preconditions for democracy development. Many democratic countries are facing with the decrease of political participation on different levels: electoral, conventional, and non-conventional. Political knowledge is proven to have a crucial role in developing political participation, but in this research the emphasis is on perceived political knowledge and its effects on different levels of political participation. This paper aims to investigate the role of perceived political knowledge in the intention to engage in different levels of political participation and to establish the role of political marketing in increasing the levels of political knowledge. Even though political marketing is mostly used by politicians to attract voters, it can also be used as a tool for developing political participation, which can provide various benefits for political parties or candidates. The aim of this paper is also to investigate potential differences in the level of perceived political knowledge in regards to gender, age, level of education, and income, which can be a valuable input in political marketing segmentation. The research was conducted in five counties from Eastern Croatia in 2017 using a highly structured questionnaire. For the purposes of obtaining survey results, univariate (frequencies and arithmetic mean), bivariate (ANOVA and t-test) and multivariate (correlation, linear regression) statistical data analysis was performed with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 21.0. Results have shown statistically significant influence of perceived political knowledge on different levels of political participation and proven that higher levels of perceived political knowledge are expressed by men, older people, people with higher income, and people with a higher level of education. The implications of how to use political marketing to increase levels of political knowledge are provided.

political marketing, political participation, perceived political knowledge

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