The Intrusion of Value Change: Mass Media and Feminist Attitudes in Argentina (with Elias Dinas)

Every so often, societies see new values, such as LGBTQ+ or gender egalitarian norms, emerge from the periphery to significantly shape mainstream discourse. We address the mechanisms behind these sudden shifts in public opinion by pointing to the role of media in successfully transmitting new value benchmarks. We make use of Intrusos en el Espectaculo, a daytime entertainment TV show running for twenty years in Argentina, which, unexpectedly and unlike its media peers, dedicated an entire week informing its viewers on feminism and abortion instead of celebrities' latest gossip. As feminist activists passed through their screens, we argue that Intrusos destigmatized the movement for legal and free 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 approximately 300,000 tweets by Argentinean MPs 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.