News Trend in Political Participation: Does News Convince Female Electors to Vote? A Comparative Study between Egypt’s (Cairo) and Morocco’s (Rabat) Media Campaigns

The aim of this paper to explore the news availability and its effect on female voting behaviour in Egypt’s capital Cairo and Morocco’s capital Rabat political elections. The study used an exploratory research design, working within a qualitative paradigm two sources of evidence were employed. Commentary was compiled from respondents: (i) Twenty in-depth face-to-face interviews with key respondents from Egypt and Morocco (ii) Four focus groups with each group containing six respondents in Egypt and Morocco. In regards to the findings, the media impact was apparent in both countries that influence citizens. However, they mentioned minimal influence by the available political news. Egyptian citizens confirmed that they were not convinced that the available news convince females to vote, as they felt that the available newspapers and news websites is of less credibility, yet Moroccan citizens confirmed that the available news is credible and it does convince females to vote. Mentioning social and cultural determinates that affects females in the society, both Egyptians and Moroccans claimed that females have their full rights that gives full freedom to participate in the elections. Finally, both citizens conformed that the social media, is the most effective medium employed in political media campaigns.


Introduction
The most famous and probably the shortest definition of democracy was delivered by Abraham Lincoln in h is historic Gettysburg Address of 1863: "Govern ment of the people, for the people, by the people".
Democracy as a perception, it is way different and multifaceted, it is something which is documented by plenty of modern democracy theories (Saage, 2005;Sch midt, 2010). Besides, a main factor which distinguishes these challenging theories, is the participation level and the engagement forms they expect fro m cit izens (Dahlg reen, 2009). Yet, one main civ ic duty which is co mmon by all modern theories of democracy, is that the citizens should keep themselves informed about public issues; first to be able to participate in the public d iscourse, second to form qualified political opin ions, and finally to implement their right to vote.
Past studies have shown that the Arab med ia tend to operate with authoritarianis m and social responsibility as med ia norms, which override liberalis m. Past evidence also shows that Arab governments used press laws and intimidation to close down media and news outlets to maintain their strict control over the media and its content (Rugh, 2004;Sakr, 2001). However, there was a slow movement towards democratic reform in Egypt that allowed mo re freedo m of the press and the adoption of western democratic press principles.
The former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was required to resign after 18 days of strikes and social arrest. Media played the role of engaging and organizing the protes ts. Moreover, it was a major element in build ing the movement (Sohail & Chebib, 2011). The important effect of med ia during the revolution led the government to block internet (consequently no access for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube…, etc.), and blackout mobile phones' network. However, those barriers were not sufficient, as successful workarounds were found (Sohail & Chebib, 2011). People were attracted to media and eventually they were attracted to the revolution leading them to participate.
During President Hosni Mubarak's regime, the Egyptian media environment was characterized by inconsistency and uncertainty. Mubarak had strict control over med ia outlets and operations through various laws such as the Egyptian penal code, the 1996 press law, the Egyp tian constitution, and press licensing laws. Nevertheless, in the later years of Mubarak's reg ime, the Egyptian med ia started to observe much freedo m and democracy when the existing government allowed the format ion of the first daily independent newspaper Al Masry Al You m, plus it eliminate the ban on issuing licenses for private channels (Al Masry, 2012). On the other hand, the Egyptian television environment started to embellishment in 2000s, for the first time, when, the Egyptian government conformed on the issuing of issue licenses, which allowed private Egyptian television channels to be launched. Mainly the government was under severe pressure to satisfy the national business niche, pamper in state investments and finally to surpass other Arab countries to be the finest among Pan Arab med ia production. This leads to understand that med ia strategies and promotional campaigns, wh ich are usually used to help increase their share through election campaigns (Kotler, 1975). Indeed, authors assume that perceptions of candidates and voting objectives are more generally focused on personality image, rather than policy (Guzmá n & Sierra, 2009). It is crucial to consider media and communicat ion processes generally in the study of conflict formation which has been widely pred ictable (Hoffmann, 2013).
Given what has been discussed thus far, this led the researcher to seek understanding the news in Egypt and Morocco in order to exp lore the news availab ility and its effect on female voting behaviour in Egypt's capital Cairo and Morocco's capital Rabat political elect ions. To address this, five main areas were d iscussed from cit izens perspectives (i) The media impact in Egypt and Morocco (ii) The extent were the female electorates influenced by availab le political newspapers or news website (iii) Female electorates perception of the available news (iv) Social and cultural determinants of the female political participation, and finally (v) Most effective mediu m emp loyed in political med ia campaigns. This paper does not represent the political, religious, economic and/or social views of the authors. The paper is structured as followed: literature review, methodology, findings, and conclusion.

Literature Review
The studies are mostly very relevant to the discourse under construction and provided insight into the or political representation has been underlined by large number researchers of feminist and democracy researchers. Yet, many forms of polit ical part icipation or other behaviors exist outside of the formal political scope must be tackled in order to both ackn owledge their impo rtance along with how they cooperate with more fo rmal political behaviors. Naib (2011) wrote about females who had become polit ical activ ists. Thusly, they utilized online life to illu minate and report their "ace progressive stories and commit ments" adequately. Their online posts, pictures, recordings and tweets became mo ment web-based life hits, so turning into a web sensation and turning into an energizing cry to move others to jo in the fights at Tahrir Square. As an example, Naib (2011) in her written news article for Aljazeera, t itled "Wo men of the Revolution" reports on a number of young women who had become political act ivists. As such, they used social media to inform and document their "pro-revolut ionary stories and contributions' very effectively. Their on-line posts, pictures, videos and tweets became instant social media h its, so going viral and beco ming a rally ing cry to inspire others to join the protests at Tahrir Square. What the discussion has highlighted thus far is the dichotomy faced by Egyptian wo men. The Arab spring, and more so, the revolutions of January and June revived women's aspirations. Women became active actors that helped shape the future of Egypt, they felt at last they had a voice and their contributions recog nized (Khodair & Hassib, 2015). Naib (2011) claimed that a real sense of how wo men felt about their part icipation with in the revolution, Egyptian wo men, just like men, as they all as Egyptians shaped a new political and social scene (Naib, 2011).
Ironically beyond this, such aspirations remained very much an idealist view and the reality proved to be much more co mplex, because women faced social and cultural obstacles, and still do even to this day (Bot man, 1999;Bastawy, 2014Bastawy, , 2015Frant zman, 2017 online fo ru ms. The study used a focus group with a d iverse group of wo men recru ited fro m the general public; also, in-depth twitter-enabled survey, and an in-depth semi-structured survey of members of an international professional women's network. Finally, the s tudy revealed that several barriers to wo men's involvement and new med ia strategies should be developed using gender mainstreaming principles. Besides, there were few differences between male and female uses of new med ia. Wo men seemed to be more interactive on social med ia, as they have more followers and likes, compared to men. Mcleod et al. (1999), that examined the ro le of co mmunity integration and mass and interpersonal communicat ion in forecasting two types of local polit ical participation; "institutio nalized" acts of  Unlike majority of studies, a study by Wilkins (2010)  that access to Internet and online election news significantly, imp roved the chance of voting.

Method
According to Malhotra, Birks, and Wills (2010), Qualitative research approach (Figure 1) is divided mainly into two categories direct and indirect. The researcher mainly used both direct approaches.

Research Instruments
The paper used two sources of evidence: face-to-face semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The advantages and disadvantage of these sources of evidence is well docu mented and will not be rehearsed here. The rationale for this techniques merge is found in what the paper aimed to exp lore. The aim of this paper to exp lore the news availability and its effect on female voting behaviour in Egypt's capital and richness of descriptive reports of individual insight which is mainly used in feminist research (Hakim, 2000). Moreover, according to Carson et al. (2001) citizens' feelings towards Tony Blair; they used the Blair focus groups to know people's feelings towards the brand. Simultaneously they asked some citizens to write letters to Tony Blair (Scammell, 2007). Th is research conducted twenty in-depth face-to-face interviews with citizens in both capitals Cairo and Rabat (key informantssee table 1). Respondents were chosen from occupations such as academia, co mmunicat ions, financial services, organizat ions. containing six respondents (Morgan, 1996;Threlfall, 1999;Hakim 2000;Malhotra & Briks, 2003).
Respondents were drawn fro m: socio-economic groups A and B fro m d ifferent professions, as noted in earlier in table 1 above.
Moreover, based on particular demographics, such as, education, gender, nationality and age respondents were targeted and placed into one of the four focus groups. Unlike Egyptian focus groups, it was an obstacle in Morocco to set the focus groups with n a place, which was café and restaurants, with d ifferent citizens. Therefore, given that the topic negotiates an important political issue which is controversial topics in both Egypt and Morocco, the paper wished to explore the differing opinions of the various cohort of citizens, and ascertain whether they were able to influence and change opinions of one another. In essence, as an unexplored topic, value fro m focus g roups, allowed the researcher to reach valuable evidence on language or behavior and capture real -life co mmunicat ion among the various focus group members (Threlfall, 1999). A co mbination of snowballing, judg mental and referrals were used to access suitable respondents, focus groups revolved around the same interview guidelines; in order, to confirm what has been concluded from the interviews.

The Peri pherals
All research instruments were being tested throughout the pilot study; the pilot study allowed adjustments and pre-warning aspects within the study that could demonstrate any problem. On the other hand, the possibility of reliab ility and generalizab ility were conceded as Morocco and Egypt's has a very unstable political situation; also, the attitudes from city to city and fro m urban to rural. Given the environment and sensitivity of the study, Judgmental and Snowballing techniques were considered appropriate forms of sampling. With regards to ethical issues, before participating within the study all respondents were made aware of the nature, topics and purpose. Also, all respondents consented to have their names published. However, names will not appear with in this paper. Each indiv idual will be coded from the alphabet fro m A to J and have an initial letter as (e) o r (m) depends on their country.
Retouring to cultural and polit ical sensitivity, all fieldwork was conducted by a trained female Egyptian researcher, in Cairo, Egypt and, within the natural and familiar setting of the respondents. The interviews and focus groups were conducted in Arabic, as its convenient for both Egyptian and Moroccans; thus, the issue of forward and back translation was addressed, main ly, two steps to translation were conducted. First, interviews, and, focus group's questions were written in and translated from English to Arabic. These were then sent to an experienced English/Arabic translator to approve the translation reliability. After, the comp letion of the field work, instruments were translated fro m Arabic back into Eng lish during the process of transcribing data. The integrity of the respondents spoken word was maintained throughout. Finally, all semi-structured interviewers were voice recorded via an electronic devise, as well as, copious notes taken. Similarly, focus groups were recorded to in order to remember the discussion.
In-depth interviews and focus groups are necessary in emerging marketing theories. A large number of studies using qualitative methods have been conducted in market ing in the consumer context (e.g., Belk, 1992;Belk et al., 1988;Alam, 2005). However, in this paper, the author intends to follow the theory building purpose by using in-depth field interviews with Egyptian and Moroccan citizens. As, research does advantage from having different sources of evidence. Additionally, the use of multip le sources of evidence helps in achieving construct validity in a qualitative research (Yin, 1994). In -depth interviews are used more in academic research with 15-25 people (Hakim, 2000).

Fi ndings
There are five main areas that the study explored fro m the cit izens perspective, (i) the media impact in During the face-face interview phase it transpired that the med ia impact was apparent in both Egypt and Morocco, that had a huge influence on citizens. Ostensibly, citizens believed that nowadays digital med ia has a huge impact on daily lives, and most people get information and news from on line med ia as respondent B(e) noted: "media is the thing that we wake up to its our source of news, and mostly it's so credible."

Also, respondent I(m)
"media is credible as long as you know how to interpret the message" Citizen also confirmed that the Media impact on the social level is more palpable than political one, as respondent J(e), "med ia impact is high we learn everything fro m media, we get updates about our family and friends through, we even know how to dress from med ia, and we get some political updates" What became evident throughout the interviews and all focus groups that citizens noted a huge media impact, especially on teenagers and young adults, that when the interviewer asked on media impact, mostly all cit izens confirmed that all people became med ia users by different means, so eventually Citizens were also asked to evaluate news content that they find daily or weekly according to their usage, Respondent C(e) added, "mostly the available news is an agenda from the government" Respondent A(m) supported, "we find the new but it doesn't mean that the news available if of a value" During the focus groups citizen were confirming that they find news, in both countries, as they news always available on tv, online or through newspapers. However, they mentioned that not always updates about the political arena.

(iii) Female electorates perception of the available news
It was found that Contrary to popular belief, media exposure seems to have little relat ionship to voters'; prior political attitudes and educational levels are much stronger predictors of these perceived images rather than the available news. Egyptian citizens confirmed that they were not convinced that the news (availab le news) convince females to vote, as they felt that the availab le newspapers and news websites is of less credibility, yet Moroccan citizens confirmed that the availab le news is cred ible and it does convince females to vote.
As respondent B(e) went on to pointed out: "of course, the news available during the voting period that specific times will all support the candidate" Egyptian citizens confirmed that news credibility is weak and does not provide the true image consequently it does not help in the voting behavior, respondent E(e) added, "I go vote but not because of the news is trustworthy. but because I will be fined if I didn't vote" Some cit izens confirmed that the voting behavior is done according to prior informat ion regarding the candidates, and the available news is usually is a form of updates rather than valuable news, Respondent E(m) added, "we vote because we have a prejudgment on the candidate"

(iv) Social and cultural determinants of the female political participation
The penultimate part of the interv iews and focus groups explo red the perceived role of wo men within the society. Its important part to understand the society role. Here questions focused upon seven areas with a co mmon theme of social and cultural determinants. Citizens fro m both countries agreed upon female having their fu ll rights in the society, as respondent E(e) stated, "men and wo men are equally treated in the society" On the other hand, only one respondent fro m Morocco claimed that females and males a re not treated equally and still female d id not achieve their freedom, Respondent I(m), "females are bargain ing and fighting, but still they are mostly home as housewives" Also, citizens were asked to comment on the female ro le in the political arena, whic h was more likely positive and the role in the society, all respondents equalized the role as male make ones. Respondent C(e). In essence, respondents were asked to comment on Challenges and barriers that face women's political participation, Respondent A (e) added, Respondent A(m) claimed, "proactive gender equality policy in parliament which results in a high number of female polit icians" Citizens were asked to co mment on Challenges and barriers that face wo men's polit ical participation, answers varied but within the same context, some of the cit izens commented on the Male Pressure in the society as respondent B(e) added, "we always follow men in voting we take it as family decision, we usually vote for the same candidate" Respondent C(m) supported, "it 's not like they force us to vote but eventually we vote for the same candidate" (v) Most effective medium employed in political media campaigns The last section consisted of question regarding the most effective mediu m emp loyed in politica l campaigns and whether this mediu m is appealing to females or not. When respondents were asked regarding the most emp loyed mediu m in political campaigns, noticeably of the 20 (n=100%) face-to-face interviewees and the four focus groups, all agreed that so cial media is the most used and most effective as respondent C(e) stating, "since the 2011 revolution social media became a weapon that collapsed the old regime" Moreover, respondents were asked to state which social mediu m precisely is the most used. The answer varied among participants, almost 10 (n=50%) conformed that Facebook is mostly used, the other n=50% agreed that twitter is the used and most suitable mediu m in political campaigns. As respondent F(e) purported: "I guess its Facebook mostly used but not as much credible as twitter" When participants were asked to state where the mediu m is appealing to females n=100% agreed that yes Facebook is used friendly and used by almost all females with all levels in the society, so they have access for information and updated by all political news. Finally, respondent G(m) stated: "Facebook is the most used mediu m for entertain ment and news as well for males and females"

Conclusion
This paper set out to exp lore the news availability and its impact on female voting behaviour in Egypt's capital Cairo and Morocco's capital Rabat political elections. To address this, five main areas were discussed from cit izens perspectives.
Through the qualitative methods, it's been found that the media impact in Egypt and Morocco is quite huge. It is quite clear that the med ia p layed an important role in these countries, especially Egypt as throughout the interviews and focus groups the citizens mentioned how powerfu l the med ia was during the revolution, adding that the fo rmer president Hosni Mubarak was required to resign after 18 days of strikes and social arrest. Media p layed the role of engaging and organizing the protests. Moreover, it was a major element in building the movement. Cit izens did also mention that the role of media in entertaining is more powerful than the polit ical one, especially in Morocco. The cit izens in Morocco confirmed that med ia is an important element in their daily lives, but the news or 'political news' is not that powerful and it is not of a strong impact, interestingly they are happy with what is being aired or published.
In addition, when talking about the female role in society both in Morocco and Egypt equalized the ro le of female with the males, mentioning that they have the s ame rights and eventually the same political rights. But, surprisingly, they added that of course they face some obstacles and barriers in the society that might prevent in polit ical part icipation so me o f them is the male p ressure. On the other hand, they added that they do participate and they do convince their peers to participate as well. Furthermo re, they mentioned that when females are elected it a kind of a motive that might lead them to participate.
The news was an interesting part in the analysis. First both countries conformed that the newspapers are not durable nowadays, and the informat ion they get is fro m the dig ital news. However, they mentioned minimal influence by the availab le polit ical news. As the in fluence is not apparent and does not change anything. In addition to, the Female electorates perception of the available news, Egyptian citizens confirmed that they were not convinced that the news (available news) convince females to vote, as they felt that the available newspapers and news websites is of less credibility. In their defense, that most of political news during election will, of course, support the candidates and its kind of updates of what is going on in the country rather than informat ion regarding the candidates. On the other hand, Moroccan citizens confirmed that the available news is credible and it does convince females to vote, as they said it convince both males and females. The question is, so the news does not influence Moroccans, but it does convince them to vote? They also added that they go for news available on social media such as twitter and Facebook. Unexpectedly, they said that Facebook is not that credible, but it's the most used mediu m, along with twitter especially in polit ical news. Also, they mentioned that Facebook is appealing and easy to use, as of course each candidate always makes sure to establish a communicat ion channel which is usually through Facebook or twitter with cit izens.
This research revealed the important trends that need to be addressed by the news to avoid the decline in the distrust of the voters. At the same time, it focused exclusively on the views and co mments by electorates from two countries wh ich represents only one-sided view of the picture. To deeply understand the phenomena of trust and trust breach between political candidates and voters, voters should be brought on the board and their views should be compiled. A very important future research direction is based on the identification o f reasons and factors contributing in the voter's decision, is the analysis of news content. This will help the political candidates as well as polit ical parties to utilize the research findings to strengthen the relationship with their voters based on trust. It is important to understand that political success is not always defined and determined by the same factors, and that the needs and expectations of the electorate might vary fro m one country to another.