13:10 - 14:50
P13-S312
Room: -1.A.02
Chair/s:
Felipe Torres-Raposo
Discussant/s:
Giulia Buccione
Internet Roll-Out and Attitudinal Change: The Case of Abortion
P13-S312-1
Presented by: Daniela Urbina
Pablo Argote 1Daniela Urbina 2
1 University of Southern California
2 University of Southern California
Although abortion remains a highly contested issue worldwide, Latin American countries have experienced an accelerated turn to greater public support for reproductive rights. This shift co-occurred with the expansion of high-speed broadband throughout the region, facilitating individuals' consumption of online content and social media on a global scale. While cultural diffusion approaches predict that new mass media will further disseminate gender-egalitarian scripts, recent evidence suggests that internet-based outlets may increase polarization around ideologically contested issues. We examine how exposure to high-speed broadband at the municipality level impacted individuals' support for abortion policies. We focus on the case of Chile between 2012 and 2019, a period when abortion attitudes radically changed in this country. In particular, we leverage the temporal and geographical variation in Chile's roll-out of high-speed internet and combine it with repeated public opinion data (LAPOP Survey). We estimate two-way fixed effects and staggered event-study models while exploring heterogeneous treatment effects according to individuals' socioeconomic status, age, gender, and religion. Our preliminary findings indicate that access to high-speed internet increases support for abortion policies when the mother's health is at risk, particularly among respondents residing in municipalities where at least 75 percent of the population is exposed to high-speed broadband. Notably, the effect is mostly driven by less educated respondents.
Keywords: Abortion; Internet; Latin America.

Sponsors