To click or not to click? A study of the innovation resistance of political emails

Abstract

As a novel technology in the age of information, the Internet has become a fancy vehicle through which campaign messages can be delivered to prospective voters via multiple paths such as websites and emails. However, despite the effort put into making campaign messages as appealing as possible, studies show that the click-through rate of campaign emails remains relatively low. In the past, many studies concerning technology adaptation have focused on the aspect of “innovation diffusion” rather than “innovation resistance”. The aim of this study is to integrate ideas derived from the Technology Acceptance Model, the concepts of innovation resistance and the theory of ad avoidance to find the factors that influence voters' resistance of reading political emails. An online survey was conducted, in which a sample of 1012 voters in the 2009 local election in Taiwan was studied. The results showed that negative impression and perceived interruption were the factors behind people's resistance of politically-related emails. In addition, both of the above factors affected people's attitudes toward opening future political emails.

Keywords:

• political email
• innovation resistance
• Technology Acceptance Model
• ad avoidance
• online survey

Acknowledgements

This research is a part of the project “A study of the Innovation Resistance of Candidates' Web Sites, Blogs and E-mails” founded by the National Science Council (NSC 97–2410–H–030–018–SSS). The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Notes

^1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 IAMCR World Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, July 13–17, 2011.

^2. During the initial survey, the original question to measure “Internet use” was: “What's the average hour for you to spend on the Internet a day?” (1) 1–2 hours (2) more than 2 hours and less than 3 hours (3) more than 3 hours and less than 4 hours (4) more than 4 hours and less than 5 hours (5) more than 5 hours and less than 6 hours (6) more than 6 hours. However, according to the answers of the respondents, some of them had Internet use of more than 8 hours, and some of them used the Internet less than 1 hour a day. Based on this, the authors added two more options: “less than 1 hour” and “more than 8 hours” for this question in the formal survey.

^3. Because the three factors of perceived risk, perceived uselessness and negative image came into one factor through the factor analysis, the authors named the new factor as “negative impression”. The Cronbach's alpha value for this variable was .82. In addition, perceived ad clutter and perceived goal impediment came into one factor, which the authors labeled as “perceived interruption”. The Cronbach's alpha value for this variable was .71.