Political parties and politicians around the world have begun to use WhatsApp as a means of broadcasting their messages to voters. By contrast, social media features both vertical and horizontal communication. Traditional media consists primarily of ‘vertical communication’ - where content disseminates from a common source without interaction. Social media differs from traditional media in that it allows users to engage in ‘horizontal communication’ – the two-way information transmission between individuals (Zhuravskaya et al.

To study the effects of social media, it is useful to understand how it compares to traditional media. But over time, social media has been characterized by low-quality and ideologically segregated information, resulting in concerns about misinformation and polarisation (Guriev et al. Development economics research demonstrates that voter information is an important input into the democratic process (Pande 2011).

Despite widespread concern about the role of social media in elections, little evidence exists on how platforms like WhatsApp influence the democratic process.Īt its advent, social media seemed a promising way for people to connect and keep up with the world around them. Due to its popularity, WhatsApp has become a common tool for political parties and politicians to reach voters. More than 500 million WhatsApp users make the chat-based application India’s most used social media platform. Nowhere is this more so than in India, the world’s largest democracy. Democracies around the world are reckoning with the impact of social media on their elections.

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