Exposure to Partisan News and Its Impact on Social Polarization and Vote Choice: Evidence From the 2022 Brazilian Elections

Abstract

Studies have found limited evidence consistent with the theory that partisan and like-minded online news exposure have demonstrable effects on political outcomes. Most of this prior research, however, has focused on the particular case of the United States even as concern elsewhere in the world has grown about political parallelism in media content online, which has sometimes been blamed for heightened social divisiveness. This article investigates the impact of online partisan news consumption on voting behavior and social polarization during the 2022 elections in Brazil, a country where the public’s ties to political parties have historically been more limited or nonexistent but where ideologically aligned news content online has markedly increased in recent years. Drawing on a unique dataset linking behavioral web-tracking data of 2,200 internet users in Brazil and 4 survey waves with the same respondents, conducted before, during, and after the 2022 presidential elections, we find no significant relationship between the use of partisan media on either vote choice or social polarization overall; however, we do find some weak and inconsistent effects of trust in news moderating the impact of partisan media on social polarization.