Social Media Usage and Political Participation among Female Voters in Sukkur Division: The Moderating Role of Digital Literacy and Patriarchal Constraints

Abstract

The main objective of the current paper is to explain how social media use is related to political engagement of female voters in Sukkur Division of the state of Sindh in particular with a complicative role given to digital literacy and the patriarchal restrictions. It is a quantitative and a cross-sectional study aimed at exploring any effects of platform engagement behaviour and socio-demographic factors on changing political behaviour (According to The Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) and the Civic Voluntarism Model (CVM). The proposed hypotheses were tested with the help of ANOVA methods and moderated regression methods. These findings suggest that social media can prove to be quite fruitful in enhancing female political participation and involvement; however this was not the case across all media platforms; with Facebook registering higher political involvement and participation within this group compared to Instagram. They discovered that age, and education moderately affected this relationship, but these factors had an average explanatory power. In more detail, higher levels of literacy smoothed out the relationship between social media use and political participation, and strong patriarchal controls moderated relationship between social media use and political participation. Summing it up, this paper finds that although it is an enabling factor, social media is not a consistent motivating factor for political engagement.