Hugo Chavez's Polarizing Legacy: Chavismo, Media, and Public Opinion in Argentina's Domestic Politics

Sagarzazu, Iñaki; Mouron, Fernando

doi:10.4067/s0718-090x2017000100007

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The resulting polarization pervades Venezuelan political life and even shapes who believes in different political conspiracy theories (Carey 2019). In fact, Chávez even polarized public opinion in places outside of Venezuela (Sagarzazu and Mouron 2017).…”

Section: Political Polarizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucratic Politicization, Partisan Attachments, and the Limits of Public Agency Legitimacy: The Venezuelan Armed Forces under Chavismo

Polga-Hecimovich

2019

Lat. American Res. Rev.

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Which factors determine support for the armed forces? What is the effect of agency politicization on confidence? Existing studies, which draw largely from bureaucratically neutral militaries, find that interpersonal trust and demographic variables play significant roles in determining public confidence in the armed forces. I argue that this is different for a politicized agency. A loss of bureaucratic neutrality activates voters’ partisan attachments, inducing individuals to judge the agency on the basis of their ties to the governing party or leader. Using survey data from Venezuela, I show that government evaluation has a salient and bifurcated effect on respondents’ perceptions of their armed forces. Respondents sympathetic to the governing leader are more likely to have a favorable view of the military while those identifying as opposition are more likely to have a negative view. The results suggest that politicization of public agencies may impose an upper limit on public support regardless of institutional performance, undermine their representativeness and legitimacy, and weaken their mandates.

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Section: Political Polarizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucratic Politicization, Partisan Attachments, and the Limits of Public Agency Legitimacy: The Venezuelan Armed Forces under Chavismo

Polga-Hecimovich

2019

Lat. American Res. Rev.

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“…On one hand, studies have shown that Hugo Chávez's image has been used to criticize some progressive policies by leftist administrations (for instance, see: Kitzberger, 2010). On the other hand, Sagarzazu and Mouron (2017) demonstrated that the relationship with Venezuela has successfully polarized the media and public opinion in Argentina along a government-opposition cleavage rather than an ideological one. Nevertheless, none of these studies has answered the question of why this strategy has been used by the right-wing opposition in Latin America, or what its correlates are in public opinion in other countries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

El monstruo bajo la cama: el chavismo como un tema divisorio en América Latina

Sagarzazu

Mouron

2020

Rev. Lat. Op. Pub.

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There is a broad array of literature analyzing the interaction between domestic and foreign policy. In this regard, we have recently seen that strategic politicians use divisive foreign leaders as a tool to take advantage of in domestic politics. Nevertheless, the use of these leaders in domestic campaigns-and particularly the reasons why this occurs-has not received much attention in academia. In this paper, we attempt to approach this topic by identifying when conditions are ripe for this strategic use of foreign leaders in domestic politics. More specifically, we argue that the image of foreign leaders can be used when they present the conditions to become a wedge issue. We explore this question by using survey data on views of Chávez across Latin America together with political and economic indicators between 2005 and 2011. We find that perceptions of Chavismo are divisive in countries in which the incumbent government is ruled by a left-wing administration. Similarly, we show that, in those countries, Chavismo has all the conditions to become a wedge issue, as opponents have a homogeneously negative perception of that political movement, while government supporters are divided in their views of Chavismo.

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“…The agenda-setting theory also induced other several research directions [2]. One of them focuses on detecting media bias, either by taking into account the number of mentions related to a preferred political party [11,12] or by identifying the ideology through the position of the media regards to certain issues or actors [13,14]. Since the irruption of internet, a quantitative analysis based on the access to big data has become available, as for instance, those who take into account temporal dependence of the media and public attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying time-dependent Media Agenda and public opinion by topic modeling

Pinto

Albanese

Dorso

et al. 2019

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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The mass media plays a fundamental role in the formation of public opinion, either by defining the topics of discussion or by making an emphasis on certain issues. Directly or indirectly, people get informed by consuming news from the media. Naturally, two questions appear: What are the dynamics of the agenda and how the people become interested in their different topics? These questions cannot be answered without proper quantitative measures of agenda dynamics and public attention. In this work we study the agenda of newspapers in comparison with public interests by performing topic detection over the news. We define Media Agenda as the distribution of topic's coverage by the newspapers and Public Agenda as the distribution of public interest in the same topic space. We measure agenda diversity as a function of time using the Shannon entropy and differences between agendas using the Jensen-Shannon distance. We found that the Public Agenda is less diverse than the Media Agenda, especially when there is a very attractive topic and the audience naturally focuses only on this one. Using the same methodology we detect coverage bias in newspapers. Finally, it was possible to identify a complex agenda-setting dynamics within a given topic where the least sold newspaper triggered a public debate via a positive feedback mechanism with social networks discussions which install the issue in the Media Agenda.

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Hugo Chavez's Polarizing Legacy: Chavismo, Media, and Public Opinion in Argentina's Domestic Politics

Cited by 5 publications

References 26 publications

Bureaucratic Politicization, Partisan Attachments, and the Limits of Public Agency Legitimacy: The Venezuelan Armed Forces under Chavismo

Bureaucratic Politicization, Partisan Attachments, and the Limits of Public Agency Legitimacy: The Venezuelan Armed Forces under Chavismo

El monstruo bajo la cama: el chavismo como un tema divisorio en América Latina

Quantifying time-dependent Media Agenda and public opinion by topic modeling

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