Public Relations Political Advertising Campaign and Voters’ Attitude Evidence from 2023 General Election in South-East, Nigeria

Abstract

The purpose of this work was to assess public relations political advertising campaign in Nigeria’s general elections. Particular emphasis was on its effect on voter attitude in the 2023 general election in southeast region as it concerns voter registration, voter turnout and voters’ acceptance of election outcome. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to answer the three research questions. Primary data were generated from a sample of 400 selected respondents from the states using multi-staged sampling techniques. Results from the use of logit model shows that public relations political advertising campaign have made significant effect in changing voter attitude in the region and that a unit increase in the campaign has the odd ration of 4.5 time as large for voter registration, 5.2 time as large for voter turnout and 2.0 times as large for voter’s acceptance of outcome. Hence, the unit increase will create about 4.5, 5.2, and 2.0 more likelihood for potential voters to register, turnout to vote and accept the outcome respectively. The study concluded that public relations political advertising campaign has the capacity to change voter attitude and recommended that every effort should be made to encourage issue based public relations political advertising campaign and for electoral umpires to manage the process well so as to preserve the changes recorded as a result.