Factors Affecting People’s Decision to Vote for the Council Members and Administrators of Nakhon Phanom Local Government Organizations

Abstract

People's political participation is an important goal of democratic political system development which is one of the important indicators of democracy, which society that has a high or low level of democracy is determined by the level of people's political participation. Therefore, The purposes of this research included the followings: (1) To study the level of political participation and people’s decision to vote for the council members and administrators of Local Government Organizations, (2) To investigate the influences of personal factors on people’s decision to vote for the council members and administrators of Local Government Organizations, (3) To explore the influences of political participation on people’s decision to vote for the council members and administrators of Local Government Organizations. Obtained through stratified random sampling technique, the samples consisted of 400 Nakhon Phanom people who were entitled to vote. The questionnaire with 0.80-1.00 IOC, 0.739-.929 discrimination, and .991 reliability was used as the tool for data collection and statistics employed for data analysis were composed of frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, Logistic Regression Analysis, and Multiple Regression Analysis. The study revealed these results: (1) The overall political participation of people was at a moderate level. However, people’s voting decision for the Local Government Organizations’ council members and administrators, as a whole, was at a high level. (2) The personal factors which affected the people’s voting decision for Local Government Organizations’ council members and administrators consisted of 4 variables: genders, education, income and district of residence. Except for ages and careers, the model or all variables could be used to significantly predict the variations of voting decisions for the Local Government Organizations’ council members and administrators 26.40% (Cox & Snell R²= .264) at .01 statistical level. (3) The sub-variables which affected the people’s voting decision for Local Government Organizations’ council members and administrators incorporated election (β=.616), political rally (β=.169). And participation in political groups or political parties’ activities (β=-.234). Altogether, these three variables could be used to significantly foretell the voting decision for Local Government Organizations’ council members and administrators 48.10% (R^2Adj=.481) at .01 statistical level except for the voting campaign.