The Move Forward Party (MFP) Political Communication and Its Effects on Voters’ Perceived Political Ideology, Attitude Homophily, and the 2023 Thailand General Election Decision: Comparing Four Thai Generations

Abstract

During the past few years, the popularity of the Move Forward Party (MFP) has been growing significantly, more so in younger generations. The purpose of this research is to discover the causal relationship between the MFP’s political communication, the attitude homophily, the perceived political ideology of Thai voters, and their election decisions in 2019 and 2023. This study employed a mixed-method approach, combining the textual analysis and a survey method. In the first phase, 20 contents from the MFP’s Facebook and Twitter accounts with the highest engagements between March 1st, 2021, and August 31st, 2022 were textually analyzed. The analysis results demonstrated that the majority of message themes that occurred in the MFP’s political communication between the studied period represented the Libertarian-Left political ideology based on the Political Compass diagram which aligned with the party’s political ideology. In the second phase, an online survey was conducted with 240 Thai voters to test three research hypotheses. The results of data analyses revealed that Thai voters in four different generations have different perceived political ideologies and made their voting decisions differently such that younger generations with the Libertarian-Left ideology voted for the MFP whereas the older generations with the Authoritarian-Right ideology voted for other parties.