Platform politics in Latin America: Equalizers, normalizers, laggards, and marginals

Abstract

How has the adoption of internet-based platform politics impacted Latin American party systems? This paper fills an important gap by creating novel categories and tracing patterns for understanding how political parties of 18 Central and South American countries practice politics online. Our work is informed by the equalization versus normalization debate between that sees the Internet as either consolidating institutional parties’ strength or giving strategic advantage to new and smaller parties. Our analysis takes a four-step approach to address the initial question. First, we conceptualize platform politics in a Latin American context and generate hypotheses. Second, we create a dataset to map online and offline national party systems across Latin America. Third, we introduce four categories (equalizers, normalizers, laggards, marginals) to capture different parties’ online positioning. Last, we explore platform politics by comparing four parties belonging to the different categories – FMLN in El Salvador, Novo in Brazil, PPC in Peru, and MORENA in Mexico – and showing how they use social media to overcome their structural limits. Overall, this work finds great regional variation to extend the validity of the cyclical nature of equalization and normalization to the Latin American context.