Voting Behaviour: Everyone Has a Box

Now that the elections are around the corner for Kenyans, do you already know who you will vote for in the coming general elections? Is your choice of political party influenced by your personal reasons or a set of external factors? Are you one of the late-deciders making your choice in the moment you see the ballot paper?
These are some of the questions running through my head, trying to figure out how people vote.

No matter what voting type you are, you will probably be convinced that the decision you make is your own and only influenced by your political views and personal principles.


We should not forget the impact of our friends and the conversations we have with them, is one of the main factors which influence the way people vote. I believe there are two types of voters: ‘Opinion-Leaders’ and ‘Opinion-Followers’. Both groups have the same socioeconomic background, but what separates them is a higher interest in the elections and media coverage knowledge by the opinion leaders.

Additionally, the opinion leaders also have a grounded knowledge on the political issues and are often equipped with a kind of formal authority towards their opinion followers. According to my previous and current observations the opinion followers fraction is bigger than the opinion i.e. more than 50% of the voters are opinion followers. This  means that if you belong to the opinion followers group then your choice is born out from information filtered by your opinion leaders, not the news, media or other sources.


Other people have tendencies to vote for someone who is about to win, even if this contradicts their own political views because they want to be on the winner’s side after the election. The winner predictions can be obtained forehand by the survey reports released by the media from time to time done cleverly to effect this. Although the ratio of the people sampled for the survey to the total country's population is normally very small.

There is a small segment of the population that vote for the less popular because of personal reasons and the candidate's personality.

It is clear that media and your acquaintances can have a big impact on your voting decision without even realizing it yourself.We should all stay focused and select candidates we feel can tackle the upcoming difficulties in our constituencies, counties and country as a whole for a better tomorrow.