Unlocking the Potential of New Media Technologies for Political Communication about Elections in Ghana

New media technologies encapsulating social, mobile and digital technologies have been deployed by many countries for political communication agendas ranging from campaign and voter mobilisation and fostering democratic engagements to electoral monitoring, tracking and vote counting. Notwithstanding their massive deployment by political candidates, citizens? participation in online political communication has been dwindling. Furthermore, motivations that account for the use of new media technologies as political information sources by students at the tertiary level, have not been fully explored. The study interrogated university students? motivations for using new media technologies as political communication tools in the 2016 elections in Ghana and the concurrent political informational gratifications derived. It adopted mixed methods approach surveying of 400 students and 40 participants in focus group interviews. The findings indicated that university students are motivated primarily by surveillance reasons impelled by features of the technology to engage on politics. Notwithstanding that guidance motivations did not significantly influence voting, students reinforced their personal political values by interacting on the online political agenda of political candidates and their parties. The study contributes to theory and practice by accentuating affordances of new media technologies and balanced cognitive content as precursors of motivations for their adoption by university students.