Social networking site usage and participation in protest activities in 17 Latin American countries

Recent studies have reported a significant relationship between the use of social media and political engagement. However, there appear to be few comparative studies that explore the association between social networking site use and participation in different types of protest activities for the case of Latin America. The present study employs supervised and unsupervised data analysis techniques to explore this association for 9 different social networking sites and 5 types of protest using disaggregated data on 17 Latin American countries. Multiple correspondence analysis is applied to create proxy measures of the two phenomena, followed by a cluster analysis using these measures to classify individuals into different clusters in each country studied. These clusters indicated that there exists an interplay between the use of these sites and participation in protests. Decision rules were then induced to generate interpretable information on the clusters identified for each country. The results suggest that there is a high degree of heterogeneity in social networking site use and protest participation.