The Political Communication Preferences of Indonesia’s All-Important Generation Z

The next speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Claudia Severesia, whose focus is on the 2024 elections in Indonesia (for the president and parliament in February, and for governors and local assemblies in November). This will see increasing participation from younger generations (including millennials and Generation Z voters), and political parties will need to find ways of addressing these groups.

Generation Z voters, in particular, will have no previous voting experience, and are highly influenced by information from social media; but they remain highly underresearched in Indonesia, especially with respect to their communication and political participation. They also grew up during the pandemic, which will have further increased their reliance on social media for information about COVID-19.

This project engaged with some 800 members of Generation Z in Indonesia. The vast majority of those who were already eligible in 2019 exercised their voting rights; they predominantly accessed social media, search engines, online media (directly), online media (via social media), and television for political information, and media, family, and educational institutions played the greatest role in their political education.

They also preferred social media for political campaigns, well ahead of personal contact, talk shows, public speeches and other public events. Some 89% of respondents indicated that they would participate in the 2024 election. Overall, respondents showed a strong tendency towards independent decision-making in the electoral context.