The study on branch delegates voting behaviour towards candidate image in intra-party election of two dominant parties in Kelantan: a political marketing approach

Election in one aspect is a marketing contest by which candidate as the political product can serve voter’s choice behaviour along with other domain factors such as party image and policy commitments or the manifesto. One type of election that has visibly been marked as the battle of the candidate image or to a great extent as the competition of person is the intra-party election, an election where voters as the “internal market” select or vote the candidate to occupy the party office. In Malaysia, although the intra-party election of two most dominant Malay-Muslim parties like UMNO and PAS parties have caught the attention of whole nation, lack of research in the field of political marketing that explores why certain candidate received more preferential votes than other. This dissertation addresses this gap by investigating and comparing the underlying reason behind the vote choice of the elected candidate from voters’ perspective focusing on the perceived personality of a divisional party leader between UMNO and PAS intra-party elections in Kelantan. Moreover, this dissertation aims to understand how the integral component or the psychological factors such as different personality traits, personal and religiosity values as well as personality–congruence being incorporated to the voting decision. In this dissertation, a qualitative multiple case studies was applied with purposive sampling of branch delegates from UMNO and PAS party were selected as the unit of analysis since they were delegates who were involved in both parties’ internal elections conducted after the 12th Malaysia general election. Ten participants were interviewed as to understand their voting behaviour concerning candidate as the primary political product being evaluated. Data from the interview were analysed using thematic analysis suggested by Braun and Clarke and the cross-case analysis was employed to define the common and unique factors in each case. By comparing the two cases, the author can identify the factors contributing to voters' loyalty towards the party's leader in Kelantan state. The findings revealed that the personality dimensions such as competence, integrity, compatibility, charisma, and reliability were associated with the elected political party leader. There are seven fundamental values that served as core motivational factors embedded within the perceived traits of the selected candidate which include security, tradition, universalism, achievement and benevolence. Along with the personal values, religiosity values were identified as the underlying reason and new factors to be essential in voting decision but rarely discussed in the political marketing literature. Another major research finding from this research is that the delegates tend to vote for party leaders whose perceived traits are similar to their personalities. Results also showed that the marketing mix approach which includes the product, price, place, and promotion are approaches that are very helpful in winning the respective candidature. This study is the first application of qualitative approach to the area of understanding voter behaviour from political marketing perspective in Malaysia’s intra-party election and has some implications for the model of voter behaviour, notably the Newman and Sheth Model. Consequently, a new model of voter behaviour that incorporates the finding is proposed and this research not only contributes to the political marketing academic literature but it should be of value to political marketing professionals in designing a political brand for the political candidate based on the concept of brand personality which targets psychographic segmentation.