Privacy concerns, internal political efficacy, intrusiveness, and voter resistance to the acceptance of political mobile marketing campaigns

Political parties increasingly rely on information systems-based approaches to present their messages, engender voter participation, and solicit voter support. Although research is being conducted on how mobile devices, mobile Internet, and social media are used to galvanize voters' participation in the political process, there is an observable dearth of research on how the use of these approaches by politicians might be resisted by voters. This study examines the antecedents of voter resistance to political mobile marketing campaigns with a conceptual model, and it employs reactance and internal political efficacy theories. Data for the empirical testing of the conceptual model were obtained through a survey of 971 South African voters. The findings of the study suggest that the proposed model provides a reasonable explanation of voter resistance to political mobile marketing campaigns and identifies privacy concerns, intrusiveness, and internal political efficacy as salient factors underlying voter resistance to political mobile marketing. The findings further suggest that internal political efficacy significantly moderates and reinforces the positive impact of privacy concerns on resistance. These findings provide important guidelines for reducing voters' resistance to political mobile marketing campaigns. They also provide a point of departure for future research into this relatively unexplored but potentially fertile domain.