Arturo Arriagada

Student and Environmental Protests in Chile: The Role of Social Media

In 2011, Chile experienced two massive protest movements – one against the cost and quality of public education and another against the construction of power plants in Patagonia. This represented a unique opportunity to analyse and compare how Facebook and Twitter use were related to street demonstrations. Using a probabilistic face-to-face survey among urban youth (18–29 years old) conducted shortly after the protests, this study revealed a positive relationship between the use of social media and participation in both social movements, even controlling for other relevant variables (e.g. political interest, ideology and trust). The theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed in this article.

Politics without Citizens? Public Opinion, Television News, the President, and Real-World Factors in Chile, 2000-2005

This study tests the generalizability of agenda-setting theory in less developed democracies by analyzing data on public opinion, television news coverage, presidential policy, and real-world indicators from Chile between 2000 and 2005. After tracking attention to five different issues—crime, unemployment, health, poverty, and education—we estimate both average and issue-specific agenda-setting effects using time-series, cross-sectional ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions. The results show that there are multidirectional influences between the public, television news, and the president. Both the public and the president appeared responsive to prior news coverage, and while news coverage was not influenced by public attention, it was affected by presidential rhetoric. While these processes differed from one issue to another, overall there was a top-down pattern of agenda adoption: Policy preferences are “negotiated” between the president and the news media, with no noticeable input from the public. From a comparative perspective, the evidence shows that television news in Chile are considerably powerful and that citizens’ priorities are basically ignored by the elites, although their maneuvering is still constrained by objective conditions.

Social media in Latin America: deepening or bridging gaps in protest participation?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between social media use and protest participation in Latin America. It advances two questions. First, does social media increase the chances of protest participation at the individual level, as prior research shows for advanced democracies? Second, in a region with glaring economic and political inequalities, does social media deepen or reduce the gaps in protest participation that exist among men and women, the young and the old, different social classes, or people with varying levels of political engagement?,The paper uses cross-sectional Latin American Public Opinion Project survey data from 2012 representing the adult population of 17 Latin American countries. It presents binary logistic regression models with protest participation as the dependent variable, social media use for political purposes as the main independent variable, control variables, and interactions.,Using social media for political purposes significantly increases protest chances – it is the second strongest predictor. Additionally, social media reduces protest gaps associated with individuals’ age, gender, psychological engagement with politics, and recruitment networks.,First, the paper shows that the contribution of social media to collective protest travels beyond advanced democracies – it also holds for more unequal regions with weaker democratic trajectories like Latin America. Second, it shows that social media may mitigate participatory inequalities not only, as shown by past research, regarding institutional participation (e.g. voting), but also regarding contentious tactics.