Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/326791 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
UNU-MERIT Working Papers No. 2021-032
Publisher: 
United Nations University (UNU), Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), Maastricht
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
Subjects: 
political polarization
broadband internet
Brazil
JEL: 
D12
D72
L82
L86
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-sa Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.