The Intrusion of Value Change: Mass Media and Abortion Rights in Argentina

• In Event: Poster Session: Gender and Comparative and International Politics & International Relations Theory
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Gender and Comparative and International Politics

Abstract

Every so often, contested values, such as LGBTQ+ rights or gender-egalitarian norms, move from niche to mainstream in public opinion. While research has widely documented value change, the underlying mechanisms behind sudden public opinion shifts remain understudied. We shed light on this by pointing to the role of mass media in successfully transmitting new social benchmarks. We use Intrusos en el Espectaculo, the most popular daytime entertainment TV show in Argentina, which, unexpectedly and unlike its media peers, dedicated an entire week to informing its viewers about feminism and abortion instead of celebrities’ latest gossip. By breaking the media silence around this issue, we argue that Intrusos destigmatized the movement for legal abortion for households otherwise difficult to reach. In turn, this editorial shift paved the way for political elites to engage with a previously silenced issue. To test this argument, we collected all tweets by Argentinean MPs during a year and tracked the narrative change using supervised and unsupervised methods for text classification. Results show that after the broadcasting, MPs broke the silence around abortion and, to a lesser extent, feminism, even after controlling for temporal factors and individual politician characteristics. Supporting our argument, additional data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and Google search trends point to the show’s influence on turning public opinion in favor of the pro-abortion campaign.

Authors

• Nerea Gándara Guerra, European University Institute

• Elias Dinas, European University Institute