Political polarization and the impact of internet and social media use in Brazil

Lorena Giuberti Coutinho ()
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Lorena Giuberti Coutinho: UNU-MERIT, Maastricht

No 2021-032, MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: Influential scholars have pointed to the Internet and social media as a reason for the recent political divide in many countries. Greater exposure to imbalanced information in these environments would reinforce previous political positions leading voters to develop more extreme positions or greater animosity towards candidates of the opposing political group, a phenomenon known as affective polarization. This study investigates the impact of Internet and social media use on Brazil's recent affective polarization, exploring the historical peculiarities in the layout of pre-existing infrastructure that causes exogenous variation in Internet and social media usage. There is no empirical evidence that access to this new media environment explains affective polarization within the population under this study. Findings are consistent with the strand of literature suggesting that the recent phenomena of political polarization in some countries cannot be attributed to Internet and social media use

Keywords: political polarization; broadband internet; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D72 L82 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cul, nep-his, nep-ict, nep-pay and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unm:unumer:2021032

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