As more scholars have tended to discover about online roles in public political environment, most of them have only focused on the participatory factors which may influence their targeted participants’ behavior, and ended up their investigation at the intentional realms, then ultimately leave their assumptions. This study argues that just finding the influencing factors is not enough. Therefore, instead of just finding what have caused Cambodian Facebook users to participate in political discussion via Facebook, we have investigated even further by finding how strong actual behavior is impacted by their intention. We integrated UTAUT with CVM in this research, and examine on how performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, political interests, and experience influence Cambodian Facebook users’ political discussion via Facebook. The analysis results of 256 Facebook users show that their intention to participate in political discussion via Facebook is strongly influenced by their personal political interest, followed by social influence. Astonishingly, even though their intention behavior was found to be strongly influenced by these two motivational variables, their actual behavior is very low. Both theoretical and practical implications are provided along with some contributions and limitations for future researchers.
Keywords: Political Participation, Online Political Discussion, Social Networking Site, Facebook, UTAUT, CVM, Cambodia