Abstract This article examines how economic elites and their business interest groups in South America use indirect communication tactics in digital media during constitutional change processes. Focusing on Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, it argues that in pluralist liberal democracies business actors act more visibly and directly, while in hybrid regimes their participation is more discreet and subordinate. Using an exploratory quantitative design, the study analyses 106 media interventions through contingency tables, chi-square tests, Cramer’s V, and Categorical Principal Components Analysis (CATPCA). The repertoire of tactics, adapted from Binderkrantz’s (2005) model and validated by seven experts using Aiken’s V, enables comparison across countries and political regimes. Findings reveal significant associations between regime type, organisational size, and visibility. In Chile, large firms employed high-visibility tactics such as interviews, reinforcing their prominence in the public sphere. In Ecuador, SMEs achieved medium visibility without reaching major influence, while in Bolivia both large and small firms remained confined to low visibility, showing communicative marginality. The article contributes to elite and business interest group studies by showing how internal stratification and institutional environments shape communicative repertoires, and by highlighting visibility and media capture as key tools for understanding unequal political influence in Latin America.
Osorio-Rauld et al. (Wed,) studied this question.