What actually mattered to voters during GE2015?
The results of the Sept 11 General Election took many by surprise.
In the lead-up to Polling Day, there had been a lot of chatter on social media, and many expected voters to back the opposition. But the results showed a nationwide vote swing of 9.8 percentage points to the ruling People's Action Party instead.
So what were the issues that really mattered to voters? And where did voters go to get their information?
The Institute of Policy Studies released the results of three surveys on Wednesday (Nov 4) morning during its post-election conference.
Source of election information
Mainstream media played a bigger role than social media during the election, researchers concluded after interviewing 2,000 citizens of voting age.
Close to 90 per cent of them got their information from the television. And even social media users relied on traditional media sources for information. (A whopping 98.5% of them, actually.)
Seven in 10 social media users said they found local newspapers and their websites moderately to very trustworthy.
Issues that mattered
A random sample of 2,015 voting-age Singaporeans were asked to rate the importance of 18 issues.
The "need for efficient Government" was cited as the top priority, with about 98 per cent of respondents rating it as "important" or "very important".
Who reigned supreme on social media?
Surprisingly, it was PAP which had the greatest online presence.
Since 2011, the party has grown its number of Facebook followers by four times to 164,000, the highest number among all political parties.
It pushes out between 200 and 450 posts a month, while the Worker's Party rarely hits 100 posts a month.
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