The Impact of Media Digitalization on Political Communication in Serbia

Success in the political power game is all about how political parties get their messages across to voters, and lately, it's become a significant issue because technological advances have turned the old one-way communication into a two-way discussion on the internet. The concept at the back of this work was to explore the mere development of the shift in attention from traditional to digital media within the political context, highlighting that this phenomenon is often ignored, asauthors, due to the rapid development of the internet, have a tendency to presuppose electorate's inclination to acquire political information mainly via digital channels. Drawing such a premature and simplified conclusion is not justified because despite the surging use of digital media, traditional media such as radio and television still have a good number of adherents, so they also play a role in political dynamics. To determine the extent to which digital media have succeeded in becoming substitutes for traditional ones, we conducted research on the political information consumption preferences of Serbian voters. The research was based on the initial hypothesis that contemporary political communication should be executed mainly digitally. The survey participants responded to a series of questions related to their habits related to political news intake from various traditional media and their digital equivalents. Quantitative analysis of responses was conducted using version 26 of the SPSS software. Following this, a qualitative analysis was carried out, convincing the authors to accept the hypothesis, as the results showed that the sample leans towards the preference for digital media in the context of political information gathering. However, said preference is not overly pronounced, considering that traditional media still enjoy a significant level of popular