The relevance of leadership models in presidential leadership, and principally the role of perceived leadership in presidential election years, is an area of study with limited development but increasing importance. This study explores the relationship between young voters' leadership assessment of presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, and their reports of voting behavior during the 2008 presidential election. Leadership perceptions were collected from 812 respondents prior to the election. Results indicate that candidate leadership assessments have a significant effect on candidate preference after controlling for the impact of party identification and self‐perceived political efficacy. Further, political efficacy significantly impacted respondents' intent to vote in the election after controlling for these same variables. Party affiliation produced significant differences across the political ideology, leadership ratings, political efficacy, and likelihood of voting variables. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications as they pertain to political leadership.
A new form of social change through social media is hasthag activism, in which activists draw attention to a specific cause by using a metadata tag, such as #BlackLivesMatter. This new mechanism for social change in our new media environment is questionable, and there is little understanding of what this type of activism creates. Media ecology offers insight into the possible consequences of engagement with hashtag activism and proposes ways we can understand how it alters our consciousness and behaviour. Using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, we explore what hashtag activism offers, its multi-layered beauty as well as the dark side of this new media form. We examine how hashtag activism furthers (and doesn't) democratic communication and participation and offer some directions for future research into these online forms of resistance.Protest and social change strategies have changed in America since the dawn of the information age (Lunceford 2012). One new strategy is called hashtag activism, which is when activists draw attention to a specific cause by using a metadata tag, such as #activism. Hashtag activism is controversial because there is little understanding of whether this type of activism actually creates social change. It is clever, powerful, useless, democratic, slacktivist, international, and the struggles over its meanings and uses continue. Hashtag activism originates and circulates in cyberspace and runs on attention. It is an activism that occurs in a new media environment -one that we are in the
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