THE IMPACT OF CELEBRITY POLITICIANS PERCEPTIONS ON POLITICAL PARTY PREFERENCES

Political parties usually try to understand the factors that affect a voter's decision in elections. However, irrespective of voters' preferences, studies rarely examine how voters' attitudes toward celebrity politicians affected their party preferences, given the mediating effects of brand affinity and perceived attributes and the moderated mediating role of gender. Therefore, this study considers the effect of parties' nominations of celebrity politicians on voters' political party preference. Moreover, it investigates the causal relationship between those perceptions in an uprising nation against political parties. A representative national sample of one thousand two hundred sixty-nine (1269) Lebanese voters was administered via a cross-sectional survey in fifteen Lebanese districts. A stratified proportional random sampling technique was used. Findings showed that attitudes significantly affected political party preferences when nominating celebrity politicians only through brand affinity on a 90% confidence level (probability-value = 0.053 < 0.10) and perceived attributes on a 95% confidence level (0.039 < 0.05), evidencing a lack of a significant direct relationship (0.571 > 0.10). Voters' gender conditional indirect effect was significant for females' impact on brand affinity (0.025 < 0.05), whereas gender failed to determine voters' indirect effect on perceived attributes (0.633 > 0.10). The results have shown that gender disparities in the brand's emotional component could affect brand preferences.