UNU-MERIT Working Papers

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