SISP Conference 2022

Environmental protection has recently become one of the most salient issues within the European political space. Seminal works have signalled a growing polarization on the environmental issue, opposing the supporters for immediate emissions’ reduction and those minimizing, when not openly denying, the anthropogenic origins of contemporary climate change. Despite this growing interest, limited attention has been dedicated to the impact of voters’ environmental preferences on voting behaviour. Against this backdrop, the paper will test the relevance of environmental attitudes on voting by employing a stacked dataset based on the 2019 European Election Study (ESS). Our dataset is built in order to study the multiple relationships between each voter and all the parties in a given party system, shifting the units of analysis from individuals to voter-party dyads. We acknowledge that on the left-side of the political spectrum pro-environment positions have been already politicized. However, we hypothesize that the same does not occur for rightist parties that fail to represent the emerging pro-environmental tendencies of their voters. Our hunch is that the potential lack of relevance of environmental preferences in shaping voting behaviour for right-wing parties might be due to a lack of differentiation provided by right-wing parties on the issue. Borrowing from the famous chapter by van der Eijk & Franklin (2004), and drawing on the non-stacked 2019 EES, we will test whether the voters’ preference on environmental protection results in definite attitudes. Then, we will turn our attention to political parties, assessing the scope of their supply on the environmental issue.

Climate change is one of the main challenges facing our society. National and international institutions aim at reaching ambitious goals in order to mitigate this phenomenon. However, the extent to which substantial interventions have been done is quite limited and insufficient to weaken the negative impacts of climate’s warming. In this context, understanding how people perceive the phenomenon and how much they support climate policies is increasingly salient. In the last decades, in fact, a growing literature has contributed to study public opinion about climate change, and which are its main determinants and predictors. At this regard, the present research aims at contributing to the study of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of attitudes toward climate change. Attitudes toward climate change can be briefly defined as the set of beliefs that people have toward the warming of world’s climate; they are composed by two main dimensions. On one hand, these attitudes refer to the knowledge and the belief of the phenomenon: the belief in its reality, in its consequences, in its causes and the concern about it. In other words, climate change’s view refers to the extent to which people believe it is happening, whether is human-caused or nature-caused, how much it has serious consequences and how much they are worried about it (Poortinga et al., 2011; van Valkengoed et al., 2021). On the other hand, attitudes toward climate change involve what people think should be done to handle the problem, such as policy preferences and behavioural intentions related to climate change. More specifically, this dimension includes opinion toward general or specific climate policies - such as subsidies and investments or taxing and pricing to promote environmental actions – and the extent to which people is willing to behave pro-environmentally (e.g. rethinking the use of means of transportation or the consumption of energy) (Fairbrother, 2022; McCright et al., 2016). Hence, attitude toward climate change is a multi-faced concept composed by several dimensions. Furthermore, a uniform conceptualization of climate’s attitudes is not straightforward in the literature. Studies differ in the way they conceptualize and measure climate change attitudes: they differ in the dimensions considered and even in the way each dimension is measured. As underlined by McCright et al. (2016) and van Valkengoed and Perlaviciute (2021), this prevents a proper comparison of the results, hindering the understanding of the attitudes, their predictors, and their effects. Therefore, the object of this research consists in the study of the conceptualization and operationalization of attitudes toward climate change considering their two dimensions: beliefs and concern about climate change on one hand, and policy preferences and intentional behaviours on the other. Firstly, the conceptualization of these attitudes will be deepen reviewing the main theoretical and operational approaches to the study of attitudes (comprehensive or narrow) and considering how changes over time and across contexts influence the notion of attitudes toward climate change. Secondly, the research will purpose an overview of the attitudes’ measurements in international surveys (such as Eurostat, ISSP, Ess, Wvs) in order to provide insights about how differences of the several measurements affect the results in the study of climate change’s attitudes. The following step in the conceptualization of attitudes toward climate change regards the relationships among their several dimensions (beliefs in the phenomenon and support for climate policies). However, the literature does not provide a systematic analysis of their relationships. Previous studies analysed the interrelation between the belief in the reality, in the causes and in the consequences, finding some interlink among the sub-dimensions but also underlining their empirical distinction (Poortinga et al., 2011; van Valkengoed et al., 2021). While on the side of policy preferences, Fairbrother (2022) underlines how the relationship between concern toward climate change and support for climate policies is not clear at all. Although belief and concern in the phenomenon is quite widespread in all contexts, the support for climate policies and the willingness to pay for them is not equally diffused. Therefore, the last aim of this research consists in studying the relationships among different dimensions of climate change’s attitudes. More specific, the 2021 Eurobarometer data will be analysed to assess whether and how different dimensions of attitudes are associated each other. In conclusion clarifying the conceptualization of attitudes toward climate change would allow future researchers and policy makers to better understand which are the main constituents of climate change attitudes and so which are the main dimensions that is worth to consider promoting pro-environmental behaviours and higher acceptability of climate policies. References: Fairbrother, M. (2022). Public opinion about climate policies: A review and call for more studies of what people want. PLOS Climate, 1(5), e0000030. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000030 McCright, A. M., Marquart-Pyatt, S. T., Shwom, R. L., Brechin, S. R., & Allen, S. (2016). Ideology, capitalism, and climate: Explaining public views about climate change in the United States. In Energy Research and Social Science (Vol. 21, pp. 180–189). Elsevier Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2016.08.003 Poortinga, W., Spence, A., Whitmarsh, L., Capstick, S., & Pidgeon, N. F. (2011). Uncertain climate: An investigation into public scepticism about anthropogenic climate change. Global Environmental Change, 21(3), 1015–1024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.03.001 van Valkengoed, A. M., Steg, L., & Perlaviciute, G. (2021). Development and validation of a climate change perceptions scale. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101652

In the US, public opinion on climate change, as well as on several other issues, has become largely polarised in the last decades: while until the early 90s attitudes on climate change did not substantially vary depending on political orientation, then the gap has more and more widened, mainly because of the increased level of scepticism among republicans. Research on attitudes’ polarisation found less fertile ground in the European context, where it is more complex to split the population into only two groups characterised by different political orientations. However, in a country where the climate change issue is salient (Norway), an increasing gap between egalitarian and non-egalitarian, and between individualistic and non-individualistic people, was found. In this contribution we intend to test whether the hypothesis of political polarisation applies even to contexts where the climate change issue has received low salience in political discourse and the media debate, such as Italy. First, we will analyse Italian dynamics of public opinion on climate change issues, and more generic environmental issues, by employing repeated cross-sectional survey data coming from two studies carried out multiple times during the last fifteen years (Eurobarometer and SWG Monitor). Then, we will test whether the gap in those attitudes has widened among people having different political orientations. Moreover, by highlighting the impact of three subsequent crises (economic, migrant, COVID-19) on public opinion, we will explore the hypothesis of social polarisation. We expect that the gap in climate change attitudes between more and less disadvantaged people increased over time.

Russia's attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, began a military conflict that is regional in nature, but the defense activities and diplomatic actions carried out by Ukraine are accompanied by an unprecedented world information war. The aim of the speech will be to analyze Ukraine's communication strategy. Presentation of the alleged goals, form, content and communication channels through which Ukraine conducted political communication on social media in the initial phase of the invasion. It is worth noting that the first reactions of the governments were limited to condemning aggression, but did not announce any active support of a military nature (both defensive and offensive). The Ukrainian authorities, understanding the mechanisms of democracy and being aware of the moods prevailing in societies, especially in Western Europe, were looking for communication methods and channels through which it would be possible to convince European public opinion and mobilize states to provide aid. On the other hand, in the face of the turmoil of war, it was also crucial to maintain the strong motivation and morale of Ukrainian society. It turned out that social media played a significant role in achieving the above goals. The subject of analyzes carried out for the purposes of this paper will be all activities undertaken in social media by the highest authorities of Ukraine.

Tutti i grandi eventi degli ultimi anni, specie quelli legati ai momenti di crisi, sono stati caratterizzati da una importante produzione di meme, prima come prodotti caratteristici dei pubblici interconnessi ma oggi sempre più presenti anche nel vocabolario di attori politici e mediali. Dall’emergenza pandemica (Sebba-Elran 2021; Murru, Vicari 2021) al cambiamento climatico (Ross e Rivers 2019), dalle campagne elettorali (López-Paredes, Carrillo-Andrade 2022) ai movimenti sociali di protesta (Soh 2020), i meme sono diventati parte integrante delle grammatiche comunicative pubbliche, agendo come strumenti di narrazione collettiva (Bracciale 2021b), di catarsi (Ponton, Mantello 2021) o, in alcuni casi, come strumenti di attacco ideologico o discorsivo (Peters, Allan 2021). Artefatti culturali tipici della cultura pop (Mazzoleni, Bracciale 2019), i meme si configurano come dispositivi in grado di aggirare i meccanismi di selezione algoritmica grazie alla loro predisposizione alla viralità e alla loro struttura informativa “leggera”, strumenti perfetti del «fast food» della politica moderna (Denisova 2019). L’adattabilità d’uso dei meme permette diversi utilizzi che vanno dalle mobilitazioni sociali (Mina 2014), alla propaganda da parte di leader politici per influenzare le percezioni e orientare i comportamenti (Martínez-Rolán, Piñeiro-Otero 2016), fino ad arrivare a usi educativi per la diffusione della media literacy o di debunking delle informazioni (Ireland 2018). Inoltre, in una fase storica in cui a vincere sono le narrazioni che più convincono, appassionano o strappano un sorriso (Kien 2019), questi artefatti culturali risultano essere strumenti particolarmente efficaci per proporre narrazioni ad hoc rispetto a fatti ed eventi. Infatti è proprio sull’emozionalità che si gioca la possibilità di alimentare disordini informativi nei quali lo storytelling proposto nei meme è costruito su informazioni parziali, se non completamente false (Brennen, Simon, Nielsen 2021), e ha lo specifico scopo di rendere i meme delle vere e proprie armi ideologiche da puntare contro avversari politici (Baker, Clancy, Clancy 2019), gruppi sociali (Askanius 2021; Brantner, Lobinger, Stehling 2017) o media tradizionali (Smith 2019), alimentando processi di polarizzazione dei pubblici (Candor 2020). Grazie a queste caratteristiche strutturali i meme sembrano intercettare i nuovi bisogni comunicativi di un ecosistema in cui i tradizionali equilibri tra pubblici, politici e media (Lecheler, Kruikemeier 2016) si stanno modificando in maniera radicale attraverso meccanismi di natura sociale e tecnologica e in cui gli attori delle comunicazione politica cercano di adottare comportamenti e linguaggi capaci di sfruttare le logiche algoritmiche delle piattaforme per attirare l'interesse dei pubblici. Il recente caso della guerra in Ucraina ne è un chiaro esempio. Dopo mesi di forte tensione tra i due paesi, all'alba del 24 febbraio, con l’annuncio del presidente russo Vladimir Putin di un “operazione militare speciale”, l’esercito russo invade i territori dell’Ucraina sferrando attacchi aerei e missilistici su obiettivi strategici, tra cui la capitale Kiev. La notizia dello scoppio della guerra riecheggia veloce all’interno della sfera digitale, in particolare su Twitter che da sempre occupa uno spazio di rilievo nella diffusione diretta di notizie in tempo reale. Utenti, media e istituzioni si trovano così nella Twittersfera a raccogliere aggiornamenti su quanto sta accadendo, dalle mobilitazioni politiche nelle stanze del potere fino alla drammatica situazione in trincea. Tra le varie modalità comunicative trovano ampio spazio anche i meme che vengono utilizzati come dispositivi comunicativi per trasmettere informazioni, esprimere posizionamenti politici o per diffondere la propria narrazione in merito agli eventi, tanto da utenti comuni quanto da leader o account istituzionali. Il presente contributo intende studiare l’emersione del fenomeno memetico all’interno della discussione relativa al conflitto geopolitico tra Ucraina e Russa e analizzare come l’utilizzo di chiavi emozionali contenute nei meme abbia influito sulla partecipazione dei pubblici, costituendo dinamiche polarizzanti di meme e counter-memes. Attraverso un approccio mixed-methods, è stata analizzata la produzione su Twitter di contenuti visuali associati alla parola chiave #ukraine nel periodo immediatamente successivo alla dichiarazione di guerra (7 giorni, a partire dal 24 febbraio 2022), osservando in che modo e con quale estensione i meme abbiano assunto una posizione centrale nella narrazione della crisi (download con Twitter API). La struttura e i frame veicolati dai meme sono stati successivamente analizzati attraverso un’analisi qualitativa del contenuto adottando gli strumenti di analisi dell’immagine dei meme politici (de Saint Laurent, Gl?veanu, Literat 2021; Al-Rawi et al. 2021; Bracciale 2021a) per studiare le tematiche e il tipo di emozioni che hanno caratterizzato la produzione memetica. Tale analisi si inserisce nel framework teorico offerto dalla teoria dell’azione connettiva (Bennett, Segerberg 2013), che individua nei meme uno degli artefatti culturali in grado di tradurre istanze individuali in collettive, facendole emergere nell’agenda pubblica.

Che il discorso di Putin alla Nazione del 21 febbraio 2022 sia la declinazione compiuta della narodnost’ , intesa come fedeltà all’eredità culturale russa costruita sulla triade autocrazia, ortodossia e nazionalità, è abbastanza evidente dopo le azioni belliche protese ad invadere l’Ucraina nella notte del 24 febbraio. Come è stato evidenziato da Anna Loretoni sul quotidiano «Domani» a ridosso dell’invasione, l’operazione militare voluta da Putin «è un tentativo di verificare la capacità dell’Occidente di fermarlo, una prova di forza che il leader russo valuterà attentamente, e dalla quale dipenderà la realizzazione del suo disegno geopolitico». Da più ampi approfondimenti si evince, però, che non si è trattato di una “operazione militare speciale”, ma di una azione militare volta a realizzare un progetto più ampio, studiato nei dettagli e articolato su una prospettiva ideologica a lungo termine, maturata su basi storiche e filosofiche che si ramificano sulla fusione di neologismi che, come nel caso della democrazia sovrana teorizzata da Vladislav Surkov, che tra l’altro non corrisponde al significato sovereign democracy coniato dalla politologia anglosassone, avvalorano una forma di ontologia sociale che privilegia una visione comunitaria della vita sociale rispetto a quella individuale, e paradigmi politici che antepongono il principio di regolazione giuridica fondato sul rule of law, a forme di potere autocratico. È questa, in sostanza, l’affermazione dell’idea di democrazia sovrana che nello specifico rimanda al concetto di democrazia autoritaria che si configura nel neologismo emigrkul’t coniato sull’idea di una Stato forte, accentrato sui valori dell’ortodossia e della nazionalità volto ad instaurare «la dittatura della legge», come scrive Mara Morini nel suo libro La Russia di Putin utilizzando lo stesso titolo del libro di Anna Politkovskaja del 2004 barbaramente uccisa perché oppositrice di Putin. E proprio nella Russia di Putin, scrive Roberto Valle «si è affermato il paradigma storiografico nazional-patriottico che ha come prima ipotesi la Grande Guerra Patriottica, al fine di operare una sintesi tra la politica di grande potenza dell’URSS di Stalin e l’idea russa formata dall’ emigrkul’t» che, per Pëtr Struve è la sintesi paradigmatica di Stato-Nazione-Impero. Ciò induce a parlare di un «regime ibrido con tinte autoritarie» come ha sottolineato anche M. B. Bagnoli nel suo lavoro Modello Putin , che insieme al libro di Richiard Sakwa, The Putin Paradox , contribuiscono a decifrare i tasselli di un regime unico, che si sforza di adattarsi al suo ambiente mantenendo inalterato il crisma dell’autorità. Ma il disegno di questo regime viene propagandato da Putin anche fuori dalle mura del Cremlino. Basti ricordare l’esclusiva rilasciata al «Financial Time» il 28 giugno 2019, alla vigilia del G20 di Osaka, quando, parlando della democrazia, ha criticato il liberalismo delle democrazie occidentali affermando che «il liberalismo è al capolinea in quanto governato da un unilateralismo americano e dalla mancanza di regole nell’ordine mondiale». In quell’occasione fece riferimento al neologismo democrazia sovrana prospettandolo come un modello di «Stato forte», fondato sulla forza, alternativo a quello delle democrazie liberali. Il discorso del 21 febbraio 2022 ne è, dunque, la conferma, rafforzata da una semantica che non fa sconti né ad analogie o metafore, né ad una dettagliata ricostruzione storica che meglio chiarisce la posizione attuale del governo russo e le scelte politiche del suo leader. Con un percorso che incrocia la filosofia con la religione e la politica, le pagine che seguono analizzano le ragioni che sono alla base dell’attuale politica di potenza russa alimentata dalla Russkaja Ideja formulata dalla emigrkul’t e teorizzata da filosofi, storici e letterati dalla seconda metà del XIX secolo, fino al XX e oggi resa attuale da Putin.

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, bringing the war to the heart of Europe. Suddenly Italian media started to intensively cover the conflict that overwhelmed all other news including those related to Covid-19 (Prisco, 2022). The hyper-mediatization of conflicts is not new, but several reasons make Italy an interesting case study for the analysis of media narratives. On the one hand, Italian centre-right parties have a long-standing relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin both for economic interests and ideological reasons, especially populist ones (Makarychev and Terry, 2020). Due to the peculiarity of the Italian information ecosystem, it seems reasonable to hypothesise that this ‘relationship’ reflects in the public debate through media selecting and framing news on the war according to their political leaning. Indeed, the Italian public sphere is strongly characterised by ‘political parallelism’ between media and politics (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) that is the existence of ‘cultural, ideological and political bias in the selection and treatment of news content’ (Mancini, 2012, p. 266). Moreover, these ideological and political biases have led to the 'dramatized polarization' of the Italian public sphere consisting of the adoption of exacerbated tones and emotive language also by media (Mancini, 2013) that trigger emotional reactions of audiences that often increase ‘affective polarization’ (Garrett, Long and Jeong, 2019). On the other hand, several studies have shown that media covering conflicts often align with national interests and the government (Koltsova and Pashakhin, 2020) that in Italy is supported by a large coalition that includes both centre-right and centre-left parties. A similar alignment has already emerged during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic when Italian media strongly reduced the adoption of conflictual frames pursuing a ‘service role’ despite their ideological differences (Mazzoni et al., 2021). Considering the strong economic but also emotional impact of a war in the heart of Europe, it seems also reasonable to hypothesise that media narration of the Ukraine war should not necessarily diverge due to the specific political context and various national interests. However, considering that media audiences in Italy separate according to political and ideological cleavages (Roncarolo & Mancini, 2018), it is difficult to guess how they reacted to similar frames by different media outlets. Finally, all these processes unfold in the hybrid media system within which Facebook emerges as the most commonly used platform for news sourcing on a global scale and in Italy (Newman et al., 2021). In addition, differently from other platforms, Facebook introduced reactions that increased the range of users’ expressions towards messages, and which are explicitly related to audiences' emotional reactions (e.g. 'love' and 'angry') (Martella and Bracciale, 2021). Research Questions Against this background, this study aims to understand: 1) how the main Italian media framed news on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, 2) if they polarised according to ideological cleavages, and 3) how online audiences reacted to different frames. RQ1: Which are the main topics and frames that emerged in main Italian media news related to Ukraine invasion? RQ2: Have Italian media adopted specific topics and frames based on their political leanings to report on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict? RQ3a: Which topics or frames are the most loved/angry by audiences? RQ3b: Are these topics and frames polarized or adopted by media with different political leanings? Methodology To answer these questions, two months of Facebook posts of the main Italian media outlets (according to FIEG and Audiweb) related to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, will be collected via CrowdTangle (from 2022-02-24 to 2022-04-24). Collected texts will be analysed through Top2Vec (Angelov, 2020), a topic modelling technique based on sentence embeddings and density clustering which allows to considers stylistic elements beyond word distributions. Following DiMaggio et al. (2013), topics will be analysed to understand both issues and specific frames. The adoption of specific topics and frames by media will be analysed to understand if media outlets polarised on specific narrations. Finally, topics and frames will be related to the most common reactions on Facebook – love and angry - to understand how audiences emotionally reacted to shared or polarised frames.

"I am not in the position to be diplomatically polite. Having my parents in bomb shelters, it makes you kind of more decisive." With these words, the head of the Ukrainian Embassy in Australia asked the Australian parliament to expel Russian diplomats when the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out. When it comes to diplomacy, the theme of politeness is almost a cliché: an intangible attitude that would seem to draw communication practices centered on civility. This romantic view assumes that diplomacy is a practice of relationship and bond-building, a codified common language of international relations bent on inclusion and reconciliation. However, the platformization of diplomatic practices has resulted in a public objectification of its most aggressive practices. As a result, contemporary transformative diplomacy (Duncombe 2018) sometimes adopts communicative styles pertaining to incivility, a complex mix of postures, languages, and behavioral attitudes that, on several occasions, have affected the public debate on policy issues. Therefore, our contribution proposes an exploration of the link between digital diplomacy and outrage through a qualitative in-depth content analysis, based on the observation of the tweets posted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the period just before the Ukrainian conflict and in the first two months of the conflict (December 1, 2021 - April 24, 2022). We will consider diplomacy as a communication device that facilitates, or makes explicit, the relations between states and their dialogical confrontations: diplomacy is an essential element of international relations based on communication. As Sharp (2009) suggests, diplomacy is surrounded by a mystique: in the common understanding, diplomacy intervenes when things do not work and readjusts them, thanks to the unique skills of diplomatic officials, sometimes understood as an epistemic community (Davis Cross 2007). Diplomacy envisions that international relations are expressed under pluralistic conditions. This view predicts separateness relations, the management of which would be precisely the task of diplomatic experts (Sharp 2009). These premises sketch a vision of diplomacy that tends to be associated with civility. Nevertheless, while there are "rebellious" diplomats, it seems challenging to unhinge the common idea that diplomacy is primarily a way of doing things, albeit sometimes tactical and subtle (Bull 1977). The need to disclose diplomatic activities to the public has led many diplomatic players to join major social networking platforms. Indeed, online platforms prove to be a robust infrastructure for conducting diplomatic activities. This entry into digital arenas has led to a series of consequences: among the most relevant are a new definition of publicity and the spread of new communication formats intending to simulate dialogue or stimulate relationality, popularizing the events surrounding geopolitics (Dittmer, Bos 2019). Lemke and Habegger (2021) questioned how the digitalization process is acting on the practices of traditional diplomacy, hypothesizing two ideal trends. First, traditional diplomacy would be the prerogative of a small number of government officials, used to interacting with an equally small number of counterparts, understood as legitimate interlocutors. The communication process is predominantly focused on the deceleration and management of diplomacy through standardized practices, in a dominant logic based on convergence, that is, the management of international conflicts based on peaceful means. Conversely, diplomacy via digital tools follows different paths: it is aimed at expansion since it must reach as many users as possible; it undergoes an acceleration of processes since information must capture audiences' attention in a climate of information overabundance marked by disintermediation. According to the authors, this modus operandi would respond to a logic devoted to divergence: not only do the affordances of platforms lead to the creation of enclaves of polarization and radicalization of opinions but common platform languages and social media logic (Van Dijck, Poell 2013) can induce the emergence of practices based on trolling and name-calling. These dimensions influence state representatives to express their positions using unconventional languages, normalizing ideas expressed using the chrisms of irony or insults. Such practices can be considered as forms of outrageous communication, as theorized by Berry and Sobieraj (2014): by outrage, we mean, here, that communication that aims to provoke emotional responses from audiences, using "overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and belittling ridicule of opponents" (Berry, Sobieraj 2014: 7). Therefore, we aim to answer the following RQs: RQ1: Can elements of outrageous communication be identified in the Twitter presence of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs? RQ2: What is the strategic use of such an outrageous form of diplomacy? RQ3: Is it possible to identify a link between the platformization of diplomatic practices and outrageous diplomacy? The case study was chosen because of its relevance and some agreement in the scholarly literature regarding the use of non-traditional (almost "counter-cultural" in nature) practices in Russia's online display of diplomatic affairs. The English-language Twitter account (@MFA_russia) was chosen to be analyzed because, at present, the platform emerges as the arena of choice for international political communication. In addition, the study of English-language tweets makes it possible to investigate the deep connections between communication aimed at a domestic audience and communication aimed at an international audience. Given the exploratory nature of our investigation, we chose to employ qualitative methods. Specifically, content is investigated through a framework built from the 13 categories proposed by Berry and Sobieraj (2014) to measure outrageous communication, readjusted for diplomatic communication. At this exploratory stage, we do not include a scale to measure the intensity of the phenomena, simply reporting their presence/absence. Alongside this analysis comes the qualitative analysis of contextual elements. Specifically, the discussion and systematization of the results hold into account two factors: the infrastructural dimension given by the socio-technical structures of online platforms; and the structural dimension offered by the polarities and long-lasting dynamics of the international relations system. Finally, using the framework of strategic narratives (Miskimmon, O'Loughlin, Roselle, 2014), the discussion of the results involves the positioning of outrageous diplomacy strategies within the narrative spheres by which the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs positions its operations concerning international affairs and (contentiously) defines other intervening actors in political practices. The discussion of the results will focus primarily on identifying the techniques of outrageous communication (e.g., name-calling, use of irony, manipulation of truth, vivid contrast of opponents' positions) and exploring the specific formats used (quotes, replies, memes, emoticons). In addition, the strategic use of such a form of communication and its broader link to the narrativization of international affairs will be investigated through the identification of the actors to whom such an outrageous form of communication is directed (international organizations, other states, international media, and broadcasters) and the themes intercepted (conflict, justification of conflict, description of incidents, explicit contrast to narratives, etc.). Preliminary results show how this type of diplomacy is mainly used to call third parties into question (especially the United States, NATO, and the European Union) and to define a Russian conceptualization of the international order, which sometimes is accused of having a double standard in the ordinary management of international affairs, even concerning long-lasting phenomena. In particular, outrageous communication defines a polarized scenario where the Russian embassy network and its allies face a generic Western bloc, sometimes symbolized by a distinctive narrative construction of a U.S.-based unipolarism/exceptionalism. Therefore, outrageous communication situates the conflict in an abstraction of the international system, purposely activating affective dispositions in audiences already prone to polarization: distrust, mistrust, criticism, and open opposition are manufactured through platformed practices. Moreover, irony, insults, and exaggerations are fostered by the stylistic codes and ordinary grammar used on Twitter. References Berry, J. M., & Sobieraj, S. (2013). The outrage industry: Political opinion media and the new incivility. Oxford University Press. Bull, H. (1977). The Anarchical Society. Macmillan. Davis Cross, M.K. (2007). The European Diplomatic Corps. Palgrave MacMillan. Dittmer, J., Bos, D. (2019). Popular culture, geopolitics, and identity. Rowman & Littlefield. Duncombe, C. (2018). Twitter and the challenges of digital diplomacy. SAIS Review of International Affairs, 38(2), 91-100. Lemke, T., Habegger, M. (2021). Diplomat or Troll? The case against digital diplomacy, in Bjola, C., Zaiotti, R. (Eds.). Digital diplomacy and international organisations. Routledge. Miskimmon, A., O'Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2014). Strategic narratives. Routledge. Sharp, P. (2009). Diplomatic theory of international relations. Cambridge University Press. Van Dijck, J., Poell, T. (2013). Understanding social media logic. Media and communication, 1(1), 2-14.

The nexus between political language and the degree of crisis, with particular regard to the oratory of leaders in connection with the expectation and use of violence in the international arena, represents a rather well-established line of studies in the field of political communication (among others: Deutsh 1942; Lasswell 1965; Chomsky 1993; Davies 2019; Chiapponi 2020). Scholars generally agree that the irruption of violence as a concrete fact in the struggle for power in the international arena imparts a reductionist bent to the political communication of leaders, which assumes an essential trend, tending to be condensed into slogans and watchwords pronounced in an apodictic style, leaving little room for argumentation, making use of a style that appeals to the emotionality of the audience rather than to its rationality as a factor in the reception of communication. However, there are still few empirical analyses aiming at testing this hypothesis in connection with war crises in the 21st century, dealing with political communication going through social media: from this point of view, the case of Volodomyr Zelensky, current Head of State of Ukraine, offers an inviting testing ground. In particular, the paper proposes a comparative analysis of a sample of speeches pronounced by Zelensky, both in "ordinary" times (before the Russian attack) and during the war crisis that involved his country (after 24 February). Indeed, the research aims at two main objectives: - To capture the changes in Zelensky's oratory that appear attributable to the outbreak of hostilities with Russia, brought about by the Russian military aggression; - In connection, to ascertain the extent to which these modifications do or do not lead to a change of style in the Ukrainian President's communication, with particular regard to the populist label often attached to his political discourse (Demydova 2020; Foa 2021; Kaminkij 2022). The research aims to achieve these ends by applying a qualitative and quantitative methodology to the text of Zelensky’s political speeches, which applies a simplified content analysis of Lasswellian derivation (Fedel 2001; Chiapponi 2016). Bibliografia Aeron Davis, Political communication: A new introduction for crisis times, Cambridge, John Wiley & Sons, 2019; Flavio Chiapponi, Il movimento 5 stelle nel dibattito parlamentare sulla fiducia al governo: analisi di un discorso politico populista, «Quaderni di scienza politica”, vol. XXIII (2016), n. 1, pp. 55-106; Flavio Chiapponi, Comunicazione politica. Un approccio teorico, Milano, Mondadori, 2020; Noam Chomsky, Rethinking camelot: JFK, the vietnam war, and US political culture, Montreal, Black Rose Books Limited, 1993; Viktoriia Demydova, 2019 Presidential Election in Ukraine: How Zelensky was Elected, «Karadeniz Ara?t?rmalar?», vol. 67 (2020), pp. 581-603; Karl W. Deutsch, The Tread of European Nationalism—The Language Aspect, «American Political Science Review», vol. 36 (1942), n. 3, pp. 533-541; Giorgio Fedel, Saggi sul linguaggio e l’oratoria politica, Milano, Giuffrè, 1999; Roberto Stefan Foa, Why Strongmen Win in Weak States, «Journal of Democracy», vol. 32 (2021), n. 1, pp. 52-65; Konstantin Kaminskij, Joker as the servant of the people. Volodymyr Zelensky, Russophone entertainment and the performative turn in world politics, «Russian Literature», vol. 127 (2022), n. 1, pp. 151-175; Harold D. Lasswell, Style in the Language of Poltics, in Language of Politics. Studies in Quantitative Semantics, a cura di Harold D. Lasswell e Nathan Leites, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1965, pp. 20-39;

Information and communications technology’s (ICT) spectacular growth in recent years has provided the adequate solution to refresh political actors’ communication, as it offers a unique chance to boost their public image, especially of parties, whose respectability has suffered from a serious erosion over the last decade and a half. Spain has been at the forefront of the implementation of innovative connective forms of social mobilizations and communication. Much of the literature has concentrated on those parties, also known as digital natives, that have made ICT their hallmark. However, in the wake of the literature that explores the intra-party dimension of digital politics and in the light of the ubiquitous penetration of ICT, it seems reasonable to investigate how the digital world has transformed the party landscape across the spectrum. In particular, the paper focuses on the area which, volens nolens, has arguably been revolutionized the most by the impact of the digital, that is political communication. Within this terrain, much has been written about online campaigning, thus restricting the analysis to electoral periods. However, political communication does not end with the closing of voting cycles as permanent campaigning has become a characteristic of contemporary politics. The aim of the paper is that of scrutinizing the different ways in which contentious political expression at a party level has structurally evolved in Spain outside of as well as during election periods as a result of the increasing penetration of the digital. This focus entails pursuing an additional line of investigation. As evidenced by a recent and extensive literature review, a particularly under-researched area is that which deals with the question of resources, and specifically with how and in what do parties spend on the digital. Going beyond a strictly monetary understanding of the issue (whose investigation is made hard by parties’ reluctance to disclose relevant information), the paper intends to shed light on the way resources are mobilized to digitally empower parties, insofar as communication is involved. The focus here falls on whether parties prefer to internalize or externalize relevant tasks, which entails ascertaining the development of the Spanish ‘party-centred digital ecosystem’. The text thus attempts to answer questions such as: what kind of platforms do parties use and what importance and dedication do they attribute to each of them? Do they avail themselves of specific programmes to gauge their online interactions? Do they hire external experts to extend their reach and improve their appeal? How many people are employed internally by parties? What kind of people are they? How do they deal with the challenges that social media pose, such as bots, trolls, fake news, changing algorithms and the very fact they do not control the platforms through which they air their political messages? What role if any is played by party activists in shaping party communication? The analysis is based on 20 semi-structured interviews conducted between June 2021 and January 2022. This includes 14 current and former officials, most of whom party heads of (digital) communication. Of these, 8 were from national parties based in Madrid, and the remaining 6 from regional formations in Catalonia and the Basque Country that nevertheless hold seats in the Spanish Parliament. This is complemented with 6 interviews with actors of the ‘party-centred digital ecosystem’, namely (digital) communication specialists with their own consulting agency and employees working in larger firms.

Insieme alla crisi, l’emergenza – che ne costituisce un volto e una manifestazione specifica e, al medesimo tempo, la reazione a essa in termini di dispositivi tecnico-procedurali di governance – si è fatta, sostanzialmente da inizio anni Duemila, il «nuovo paradigma» (Davis, 2019; Sorice, 2020). Oggetto di indagine sempre più frequente da parte delle scienze sociali che hanno ereditato categorie ante litteram dedicate alla sua analisi – come quella foucaultiana di biopolitica –, e ne hanno assorbite di più recenti – come quella di capitalismo della sorveglianza (Lyon, 2002; Zuboff, 2019) –, per rielaborarle e svilupparle ulteriormente in relazione alle politiche di gestione della pandemia di Covid-19. Gli studi e la letteratura scientifica intorno alla comunicazione di crisi e a quella di rischio hanno ricevuto grande impulso e si sono messi alla prova in maniera significativa nel corso di quella «Grande crisi senza soluzione di continuità» e dell’«emergenza come stato permanente» (Amoretti, Fittipaldi, Santaniello, 2021) che, dall’attacco alle Torri gemelle di New York dell’11 settembre 2001, passando per la recessione le problematiche finanziarie globali del periodo 2008-2011, giunge sino all’invasione russa dell’Ucraina del 2022. E hanno evidenziato l’investimento simbolico (Roncarolo, 2012) particolarmente rilevante e sempre maggiore da parte delle istituzioni per tranquillizzare od orientare le opinioni pubbliche. Così è stato per la comunicazione pubblica (Massa, Ieracitano, Comunello, Marinelli, Lovari, 2022), incaricata di affiancare la governance della pandemia (e, in alcuni Paesi, gravata da un deficit di lunga data di strumenti e consuetudini/routine consolidate rispetto alla promozione della conoscenza delle questioni sanitarie), e così è stato anche per i news media (Miconi, Risi, 2022), che si sono ritrovati a dover svolgere una funzione de facto anche di comunicazione istituzionale in un contesto di infodemia e disordine informativo, e dove l’incivility si è vieppiù esasperata all’interno dei media digitali anche a causa della condizione via via più marcata di ansia e affaticamento psicologico dell’opinione pubblica. La condizione di crisi permanente – ancora più spiccata nello scenario italiano contraddistinto da una forma di «transizione infinita» (Almagisti, Lanzalaco e Verzichelli, 2014) del sistema politico-istituzionale seguita al crollo della Repubblica dei partiti postbellica – ha, quindi, inaugurato modelli differenti di leadership politica nel quadro del processo inarrestabile di personalizzazione e di quello crescente di monocratizzazione delle funzioni di governo. La domanda di ricerca da cui il seguente paper prende le mosse è: quali formule e quali frame assume la leadership politica sottoposta a una successione continua di «stress test» dovendo – come nel caso della pandemia – sospendere temporaneamente l’inclinazione e la spinta verso il permanent campaigning? Il paper si propone di delineare due stili comunicativi (Campus, 2016) di leadership che, per ottenere consenso in seno al sistema mediale ibrido, “ibridano”, a loro volta, la politica con due dimensioni comunicative e narrative provenienti da campi semantici e linguistici diversi da quelli della politica. Il leader – specialmente, in questo caso, il primo ministro o presidente della Repubblica (ovvero, il capo del governo) – ribadisce la propria fattispecie e qualità di capo politico che, al cospetto della complessità esponenzialmente crescente dei problemi del mondo – palesatasi all’ennesima potenza secondo l’asse della crisi permanente –, si offre come “filtro cognitivo” che deve fornire risposte semplificate (seppure, come ha mostrato il contesto pandemico, non semplicistiche, da cui le difficoltà incontrate dagli esponenti dei partiti neopopulisti; Graziano, 2018). Il framework che si suggerisce in questa sede è quello del «capo politico emergenziale» che, accanto agli attributi della leadership come decisione (Calise, 2016) e all’opzione tra ideologia e pragmatismo (due dimensioni che si vedono all’opera con nettezza nelle varie crisi che si succedono da inizio anni Duemila), sceglie in prima persona, o sull’onda degli eventi, l’assunzione di una componente di tipo tecnico-specialistico (rilevante perché interseca in maniera significativa la questione della crisi di legittimità e fiducia popolare nei sistemi esperti; Gili-Panarari, 2020). Da cui scaturiscono i paradigmi – che il paper intende indagare sotto il profilo della comunicazione e delle narrazioni (con particolare riferimento al caso italiano) – del politico come «commander-in-chief» (all’insegna della contaminazione con il linguaggio e le technicalities militari) e del politico come restauratore nel discorso pubblico della centralità delle discipline scientifiche (dall’economia politica e e scienza finanziaria all’immunologia e virologia, sino – da ultimo – alle scienze strategiche). Ne derivano, altresì, alcuni cortocircuiti comunicativi e narrativi (e “paradossi” casuali o artificiali) all’interno del news management e della costruzione del dibattito a cui partecipa l’opinione pubblica, che il paper intende evidenziare a partire dall’analisi di alcuni interventi sui social media dei leader politici immersi negli scenari di crisi sopra richiamati. Riferimenti bibliografici Almagisti M., Lanzalaco L. e Verzichelli L. (a cura di) (2014), La transizione politica italiana. Da Tangentopoli a oggi, Carocci, Roma. Amoretti F., Fittipaldi R., Santaniello M. (2021), Poteri monocratici e comunicazione politica ai tempi della pandemia. Dal governo Conte II al governo Draghi, in «Comunicazione Politica», 3, pp. 333-356. Calise M. (2016). La democrazia del leader. Laterza, Roma-Bari. Calise M., Musella F. (2019). Il Principe digitale. Laterza, Roma-Bari. Campus D. (2016). Lo stile del leader. Il Mulino, Bologna. Davis A. (2019). Political Communication. A New Introduction for Crisis Times. Polity, Cambridge. Gili G., Panarari M. (2020). La credibilità politica. Marsilio, Venezia. Graziano P. (2018). Neopopulismi. Il Mulino, Bologna. Lyon D. (2002). La società sorvegliata. Feltrinelli, Milano. Massa A., Ieracitano F., Comunello F., Marinelli A., Lovari A. (2022), La comunicazione pubblica alla prova del Covid-19. Innovazioni e resistenze delle culture organizzative italiane, in «Problemi dell’informazione», 1, pp. 3-30. Miconi A., Risi E. (2022). Framing pandemic news. Una ricerca sulla rappresentazione del Covid-19 nei news media italiani, in «Problemi dell’informazione», 1, pp. 31-61. Roncarolo F. (2012). Popolarizzare o rimuovere?, in «Comunicazione Politica», 3, pp. 379-408. Sorice M. (2020). La «piattaformizzazione» della sfera pubblica, in «Comunicazione Politica», 3, pp. 371-388. Zuboff S. (2019). Il capitalismo della sorveglianza. Luiss U.P., Roma. autore: Massimiliano Panarari, Università Telematica Mercatorum massimiliano.panarari@unimercatorum.it

In recent years, political polarization saw a significant rise in many political systems. This revamped a scientific debate sparked decades ago, with different schools of thought debating on dynamics, factors, and causes of polarization itself. By looking at political leaders’ polarizing strategy – one of the factors on which various theories seem to converge – this article tackles the question concerning the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of political communication. More specifically, we look at the Italian case of a highly polarizing leader – Matteo Salvini, leader of Lega – in two campaigns held in 2020 before and after the first wave of the pandemic. By analyzing his messages on Facebook and Twitter, we compare his use of partisan identity, divisive issues and attacks against others, and his followers’ engagement. The results highlight some changes between the two phases, but also a strong continuity in the polarizing strategy of Salvini’s political communication.

Journalists have in recent years faced increasing hostility, accusations of untruthfulness, or even open verbal attacks by parts of the politicians, voiced especially by populist radical right actors. Yet, the relationship between the PRR and the media is argued to be more complicated. In order to get their messages through to the audiences, the PRR needs to use the media for the same functions as established politicians. At the same time, given the complexity of the media landscape, the PRR appears to find an affinity with the media formats that give rise to disinformation and fake news. Therefore, the PRR needs to maintain a friend-foe relationship with the media. Despite worries about the increasing distrust and delegitimization of mainstream journalists amplified by populist discourses, we lack empirical studies bringing a comprehensive understanding of the exact nature of the relationship of the populist radical right towards the media. We know even less how such communication unfolds on social media which offers populist actors online opportunities fostering their claims and helping them to criticize the legacy media for being biased and unfair. Against this background, we examine the interaction between the populist radical right and journalists by analysing how the PRR actors use and communicate about the media on social networking site Facebook. We ask, how do the populist radical right actors position themselves with regard to interactions with different media formats? The elites' communication, however, does not happen in a vacuum but is embedded in a specific context. Hence, we investigate the circumstances in which the populist radical right tends to choose to communicate either about untruthful or legitimate media. We argue that this claims-making about the media is affected by the specific context: the party positioning vis-à-vis their competitors, election periods and political (refugee) and health (COVID-19) crises. Moreover, we show how such communication is dependent on the affinity of populist radical right with disinformation media. To address our research question, we focus on the claims about the media made by the PRR leader Tomio Okamura on social networking site Facebook between 2013 and 2020. We analyse the leader's communication by applying the claims analysis, adapting it for the study of 1740 media claims made from a random sample of 1207 Facebook posts. Claims-making is conscious and strategic articulation of political opinions through some form of action, for instance, a verbal act of public communication. In our case, this involves the way how the populist radical right treats the media in their social media discourses. The media here encompasses a wide range of outlets, including general references to the media, legacy and online media, social media as well as disinformation media and websites. Bridging the concepts from political science and media and communication studies, we combine actor- and communication-centered approaches to study PRR. We look beyond the understanding of the PRR relationship with journalists through an emphasis on anti-media discourses and investigate claims about the media that capture both the communicated functions of the media and post-truth anti-media attacks by PRR. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of the dual use of the different journalistic formats by PRR, which utilizes familiar media formats for their functions, while simultaneously engaging in populist and post-truth accusations and verbal attacks towards legacy media journalists, increasing distrust towards media institutions and amplifying societal polarization.

Several scholars have pointed to the particularities of the social movements that emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis (Dean, 2019; Gerbaudo, 2010; Eklund, 2019; Nunes, 2020; Zizek,2009). The demographic and the new performative of Occupy movement, their demand-or the resistance to pose a demand at all, have been the focus of the analysis, which has problematized both the agents of social change and questioned the potential of political transformation that these upheavals can bring. From a Lacanian perspective of the subject and taking the case of the 2019 Chilean unrest, I will question the potential of the digital organization and political participation to explore possible contributions to political transformation. This paper will first characterise the Chilean social unrest as a particular kind of social movement that shares characteristics with Occupy movements in terms of demographic and performativity of demand, and secondly, will focus on the collective organization dimension to question the political subject and new alternatives of political organization.

Citizens are the most distinctive element of democracies. However, the criteria determining civil society participation in national political life have not always been inclusive. The political disengagement of some social sections of the population is a fundamental political problem undermining the very notions of democracy. Furthermore, the large-scale presence of gaps in representation and participation represents an essential issue for democracy. It undermines the essence of democracy and political equality, consequently leading to unfavourable political decisions for those whose voices have not been heard. The large-scale presence of gaps in representation and participation represents an essential issue for democracy. Since it undermines the essence of political equality, it leads consequently to unfavourable political decisions for those whose voices have not been heard. Within the current political model, the youth participation deficit works as a method of exclusion from political decision-making in terms of electoral and political engagement. Young people cannot hold accountable rulers, cannot vote, are hardly represented, and certainly cannot participate through traditional democratic channels. Nevertheless, the greater engagement of young people through a variegated range of political tactics - from physical strikes to digital strikes – delineated a pathway for further investigation of participatory democracy by reinvigorating the debate about the representation of underage citizens in politics. Forced by the breakout of the COVID19 pandemic, the protests moved online. Social media technologies became a place of alter-imagination, wherein movements construct narrative patterns to denunciate injustice and indignation through the most updated instruments. Thanks to the advent of digital platforms, the entire global society experienced the creation of a telematic space in which individuals can share their preferences. The use of internet tools opened new opportunities to enhance communication between stakeholders, increasing the effectiveness of the information and practices exchange, and allowing for more excellent networking and mobilisation. Social media became a space where young people, institutionally excluded by the representative democratic system, can express themselves and the interests of future generations. The phenomenon of participation through online, anti-institutional methods might be interpreted not only under the generational lens but also as a response to the exclusion from the representative democracy of part of its citizenry: the youngsters. Through their actions, young activists manifested the demand for a rethink of political representation wherein they can act as fully engaged actors rather than ‘incomplete’ citizens. In fact, since their creation, social media rapidly proved efficacious instruments of emotional narration capable of motivating individuals to take to the streets. The increasing use of digital platforms as another arena of political discussion and the embedded use of images as a fundamental element of political storytelling might be interpreted as a response to the gap in political representation. Moreover, the emergence of a movement led by underaged activists might provide another cause for reflection: is Youth represented? Apparently, it is not. The emergent narrative from the flyers dedicated to the last Global Strike for Climate tells a story about young, intersectional activists fighting all over the world against big corporations, symbolized as a banknote, depicted as those making a "profit" at the expenses of a general and inclusive “people”. Throughout this research, I wish to examine how Youth’s symbolic and cultural representation on social media makes them representative rather than represented. What types of narratives do youth activists construct to represent their claims via social media platforms? In the last decade, we experienced the emergence of a new wave of protests mainly led by youngsters on variegated issues. Among those, the Fridays For Future movement (FFF) is probably the best representative in terms of age and intersectional participation. It witnesses the demand for accountable institutions and the creation of more active citizenship. Young people are in a unique position. Notwithstanding its peculiar vulnerability and an (apparently) limited engagement in decision-making, youth is potentially the best-placed group to define a long-term social response to climate change. Furthermore, the ability to engage people is related to the massive use of social media, as the most information channel, and the role of emotions. Social media are the primary source of information for activists of every age, even more than friends, schoolmates, or work colleagues. FFF took the chance to communicate directly and unfiltered. The young activists strategically situated themselves within the flux of daily communication. Therefore, I will take the case of the FFF movement as a representative sample of a politically active Youth, and I will make a Visual Narrative Analysis of the movement’s communication. This method is grounded on the assumption that every image created and shared embedded a story with a high symbolic value, immediately accessible to a broad audience. Visual contents are vital elements of political storytelling since it allows the storytellers to address the audience differently from official statements. Whereas political protest is essentially a visual expression of dissent in which images from protests create meaning about actors, groups or events and can communicate legitimacy or the contrary, visual content can communicate many values and meanings without resorting to discourse. A storyteller can create a sense of what is right or wrong about something, even without explicitly addressing an issue. Images and metaphors have the advantage of being indicators of different narratives, and therefore, the first object of interpretation. They depend on cultural and societal knowledge, serving as a tool for describing events and developments. Hence, in adopting the visual narrative approach, I wish to explore what the understanding of Youth’s exclusion from the representative system is, and how they represent their instances through visual content on social media. The use of rhetorical and semiotic concepts might provide the researcher with a tool to transform the implicit parts of the arguments into explicit and analysable data.

Today’s world is a digital one. We live perpetually connected to the virtual world. By way of checking emails, posting on social media, tracking the number of steps we have walked in a day, the number of times our tweet has been liked, we are always looking into the digital. We might be able to leave the house without our wallets, but never without our phones. This aspect of our lives and world has been primordially understood and read as a “tool”: we make use of the digital as it facilitates our lives in numerous ways. However, in this paper, I argue that the digital is better analyzed as a “tool-like space”, it sells itself as a tool to be used when, in reality, it uses us just as much and makes us into particular subjects. I argue that it is important to underscore this aspect, otherwise, the subjection aspect of the digital falls to the background. To bring to the front the subjection process the digital entails matters, because without it we cannot give reason to the characteristics of our subjectivity today: quantification, symbiosis, seclusion. In this paper I construct my argument by the use of a Foucauldian framework, where I problematize the digital, and underscore the power mechanisms at play. I conclude that what results from the digital is an apolitical subject, one that takes a certain an imposed truth.

This paper theorizes that radical left-wing populist movements attempting to attract support away from the radical right by articulating symbols of nationality through media ‘spectacles’ will counterproductively entrench xenophobic nationalism amongst its constituents. The paper focuses on the 2017 Jean-Luc Mélenchon campaign in France, considered a radical-left populist, and republican-nationalist movement. Mélenchon’s nationalism can be considered ‘neo-republican’ (Chabal 2015) a strand of French political comparable to top-down civic nationalism that stresses integration and the ‘universality’ of French identity and culture. To disseminate its message, the campaign conducted a series of high-profile ‘hologram rallies’ that duplicated a live Mélenchon across multiple venues. I treat these rallies as ‘spectacles’, which for Kellner are, “media constructs that present events which disrupt ordinary and habitual flows of information, and which become popular stories which capture the attention of the media and the public…” (Kellner 2017, 75). Despite Mélenchon stressing the nation in his discourse, far-right voters, who valued these concepts, were unlikely to switch parties (Hewlett 2017, 389). I theorize this is in part due to a counterproductive ‘interpellation’ effect that was produced by Mélenchon’s rallies. To develop this point, I theorize the relationship between ‘interpellation’, ‘fantasy’, ‘spectacle’, ‘rhetoric’, and nationalism as an ‘ideology’ drawing from the Essex School of Discourse Analysis and political and psychoanalytic theories of media. I analyze a selection of the video recordings and transcripts of these rallies and asses how their symbolic and rhetorical expressions could have unintentionally activated an embedded ideological fantasy of nationality that benefited the far-right.

Observing the national media, especially from the perspective of big cities, one can get the impression that the basic aspect of this communication is the relationship between party leaders, the management of the government and political institutions and the general public. The communication space is dominated by matters of national importance, and the main broadcasters - speaking on behalf of the government, ministries, and parliamentary clubs - are political leaders: party leaders, regional leaders, leaders of parliamentary clubs, heads of parliamentary committees, political experts, ministers, and their deputies. Meanwhile, interesting communication processes take place at the local level. Firstly, they are related to the communication of local politicians (at all levels) with the local communities, secondly - and this aspect will be the subject of this article - to communication activities undertaken by members of parliament in constituencies from which they were elected. It is worth noting that there is a large group of MPs who are not nationally recognized political leaders. Their place on the electoral list and subsequently the number of votes collected is a derivative of their local activity. Therefore, a research question arises, which is important to complete the picture of digital political communication mechanisms - what is the digital local political communication of MPs like? What digital communication channels do they use? Who is their target group? What is the leading theme of their messages - do they help at the local level to strengthen the communication of their parties, explain and support, or criticize the policies of the government and the president? Or do they focus on building their own political position - recognition and popularity and communicate about their parliamentary activities and achievements in working for the region from which they were elected? In theory, according to the constitutional principle of the free parliamentary mandate, they should contribute to the political communication of the party they represent. In practice, political pragmatism may induce them to take more interest in local issues - to engage in them and communicate about them. The aim of the presentation is to analyze and compare the model of digital political communication in the constituencies of Law and Justice and Civic Platform.

One of the most relevant phenomena that have characterized the 2020 COVID pandemic, is the huge number of citizens that have refused vaccination and blatantly claimed for their right to skip vaccination. This position of reject of a welfare provision is unprecedented in the history of modern, democratic societies and needs adequate reflections. Namely, while this phenomenon has been the object of social psychology studies, the aim of this paper is to draw a model of the possible causes of such behavior, by setting a hypothetical link with anti-vax choice and social representations. The work I am proposing is the presentation of a research I am carrying out for European Academy of Sciences and Arts, in which I am analyzing the data that Eurobarometer reports on this subject. Within this framework, I will show the findings that are emerging from the analysis of the Eurobarometer data, which imply: -the dimensions of the anti-vax phenomenon within the European Union -the main motivations that the antivax provide about their choices -the relationship between the antivax choice and some sociological characters, the nationality especially, but also gender and age. Through the analysis of those data, I will try to set a link between the Antivax choice and the social representations about crises- namely, conspiracy theories.

Legal communication, political narration and natural disasters: the language of "brute facts" The analysis of the distance between social practices and forms of symbolic mediation often forgets how this relationship includes the environmental context where this relationship takes place: the conditioning posed by the physical, natural and human environment represent and constitute as many factors capable of conditioning the 'communicative social action therefore the institutional subjects, the law and the context where such action takes place. These are aspects with respect to which politics, law but also the social context often pursue and suffer the problems posed by natural disasters rather than precede them. It is therefore necessary to analyze the communicative implications of the "new social problems" connected to their development and their diffusion or the consequences produced by "brute facts", physical, natural and human, on social, legal and political communicative action, where this interaction is carries out. If the recent developments of the pandemic that has afflicted mankind describe a world situation in continuous evolution, then they highlight the substantial inadequacy of the political narrative, of the normative messages, of the social communication to face and solve the problems posed by a pandemic society in continuous transformation. These are aspects that describe an unbridgeable distance between the factors considered (norms, institutional actors and the social context), materializing the problems that the reassuring blanket of ideological-political, dogmatic-legal and legislative narratives, political campaigns of uninformed information are not succeed in solving: they manifest the continuous pursuit of the political narrative, of the normative messages regarding the problems posed by natural disasters. These are aspects common to the whole advanced Western world that highlight the inability to perceive and detect the presence of the danger generated by catastrophic natural events, without being able to transform it if not into a legal or political risk, at least into a perceivable risk from one point of view. from a communicative point of view, guaranteeing the adoption of adequate remedies and solutions capable if not to solve it, at least to prevent it. The social context, including communication, political communication and regulatory messages have not been able to adequately fulfill their respective tasks, despite the fact that the law, as a residual structure with respect to politics and the social context, did not have the exclusive task of dealing with a legitimate, generalizable and non-conflictual way, the risks that other social structures would have had to manage primarily. The normative messages have been reduced to a function, albeit realistic, of maintaining an acceptable margin of communicative uncertainty, the political narrative has instead limited itself to chasing the effects of the pandemic phenomenon in terms of a mere attempt to acquire consensus without however being able to address the causes, while the communicative social context has relied on forms of spontaneous self-regulation, harbingers of contradictions and continuous tensions. If it is true that the distance between social practices and forms of symbolic mediation referable to legal, political and social communication, must be understood not on an ethical or formal level as a pathological phenomenon, but as a physiological fact, normal and referable to the usual current relationship between legal, political and social communication; then, it is true that this distance depends on or is in any case attributable to the operation of “brute facts”, physical, natural and human, referable to the environmental context, not only social, where this interaction takes place. "Brute facts", physical, natural and human, with respect to which not only politics and law, but also the human social context, seem to have adopted a language, a communicative code that is different if not completely unknown compared to the one operating and widespread in the concrete reality. In a paradoxically cybernetic and anthropocentric era, the social roles connected to legal action (the politician, the jurist, the legislator, the bureaucrat, the judge, etc.), seem to underestimate, relegate to the background aspects that underline interdependence current between man and the surrounding world: the effects that the adoption or lack of understanding of different languages, inherent to the physical, environmental and human reality, are able to produce if not in terms of total mutual annihilation, at least of relative conditioning. The relevance of the communicative code emerges, of the language proper to "brute facts", of environmental, physical, natural and human conditioning, of the consequences that they are able to produce and in fact produce on political and legal communication and on the social communicative context, and even on themselves. Taking as a physiological perspective from which to observe social, political and legal communication the "pathological" one according to which normative messages, political and social communication always pursue natural phenomena instead of preceding them, means drawing attention to an aspect in some ways paradoxical because during the period characterized by the pandemic, to describe the concrete current interactions between the factors considered (normative messages, social communicative context and political subjects) it is necessary to refer not so much to the language of political communication, to the normative-prescriptive messages of legal communication or common sense widespread in the social context (communicative social practices, coded normative expectations), and rather to a form of cognitive language referable to concrete social norms (physical, natural and human, physically coded cognitive practices and expectations), referable to the environmental context physical, natural and human, in which the interaction between the factors considered takes place. Ultimately it means taking on a completely different communicative multivartial perspective from the one taken up to now. Enrico Damiani di Vergada Franzetti

The 2021 general election brought yet another tremor to the electoral competition of the once stable party system in the Czech Republic. Following poor government performance during the pandemic crisis, the incumbent technocratic populist party ANO (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), led by billionaire entrepreneur Andrej Babiš, suffered a surprise defeat. For the traditional left parties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, the election was a disaster - the parties failed to reach the threshold required to enter the parliament. Somewhat surprisingly, opposition parties secured a notable victory. Overcoming their differences and uniting against populism, presenting themselves as 'the only democratic alternative', two coalitions, Together (SPOLU) and Pirate Party and Mayors and Independents (PirSTAN), gained a majority in the parliament and formed a new government. The election has further reshaped and transformed the once traditional left-right party competition, already shaken by the unprecedented rise of populist parties in previous years. A new populism vs. anti-populism divide has become central to political contestation defining the Czech party politics. Against this background, this article examines how the new populism/anti-populism divide emerged, structured the political competition and influenced the political outcomes of the 2021 general elections in the Czech Republic. First, we define and analyze the two dimensions that characterized the newly appeared divide: ideational and communicative dimensions of populist and anti-populist parties' campaigns before the general election. Bridging actor- and communication-based approaches, we look at ideologies and ideas employed by populist and anti-populist actors, as well as stylistic expressions associated with populist/anti-populist public statements. Importantly, we show how the specific political and social context brought by the COVID-19 pandemic deepened this divide and facilitated electoral mobilization of anti-populist forces which were better able to strategically respond to the crisis, framing the situation to their advantage. Second, we show how this party dynamic underlines larger trends across democracies in the region and compare the Czech case with other examples of anti-populist mobilization. Third, we discuss the consequences of election and breaking the established patterns of party competition on both domestic and European politics and the future of Visegrad cooperation in particular. The role of the Visegrad Four will likely be weakened. A clearly anti-populist and pro-Western leaning of the government coalition has been contested by Hungarian divergent attitudes toward the Russian aggression and war in Ukraine. Thus, we can expect a closer regional cooperation of Czechia with Poland and Slovakia and its more active role in the EU. Also, the upcoming Czech presidency over the EU will likely deepen the discussions on the energy and security issues. However, the ideological diversity of the government coalition in EU questions means that the Czech Republic is not likely to use the presidency over the EU for a discussion about further direction of the EU itself.

This research is aimed at exploring the role of conspiracy beliefs on perceived political efficacy and consequently on political participation. Indeed, recent findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs are indirectly and negatively related to conventional participation through external efficacy (Ardevol-Abreu et al., 2020). However, as Stojanov & Halberstadt (2019) suggest, “not all the conspiracy claims are conspiracy theories and not all have the same potential for societal harm”. Following the suggestion by Wu-Ming 1, we proposed to differentiate conspiracy beliefs in conspiracy fantasies (i.e., unrealistic and universalistic conspiracy) and conspiracy hypotheses (i.e., plausible and limited conspiracy), and to explore their effects on internal and external political efficacy and consequently on political participation. We predict that conspiracy fantasies and conspiracy hypotheses are two operationally differentiable constructs (H1), that conspiracy fantasies can reduce perceived internal political efficacy (H2) and consequently political participation (H3), whereas both conspiracy fantasies and conspiracy hypotheses can negatively predict external political efficacy (H4) and political participation (H5). Results from one cross-sectional survey conducted in Italy (N = 233) partially supported our predictions showing that conspiracy fantasies (but not conspiracy hypotheses) are associated with lower internal and external efficacy but only internal political efficacy mediates the effect on political participation. Implications of these findings are considered for the understanding of the psychology of conspiracy hypotheses and their social consequences and impact.

In the last few years, there has been an increase in the so-called “conspiracy theories” and “fake news” circulating in social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, which have the effect of influencing public opinion, increasing the polarization of political positions between netizens and of the conflicts within digital platforms. Despite the attempt by some of these platforms to implement a policy of “containment” of these theories and fake news, aiming to remove them from the platforms, they still find space in a media milieu such as that of social media - in which citizens increasingly tend to inform themselves and to debate on politically relevant issues. Moreover, with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories and fake news have proliferated around the use of vaccines, (which were targeted by protests and objections by anti-vax movements at a transnational level), or around theories that attributed the spread of the virus to a “leakage” from a Chinese laboratory and became viral on social networks. Some recent studies confirm that social networking platforms represent ideal public media arenas for their spreading (Vosoughi et al., 2018 ; Wang et al., 2019 ) and that receiving news on social media is associated to a greater likelihood of being misinformed on important topics, such as vaccines (Stecula et al., 2020). In addition to being more uninformed, social media users are more likely to be exposed to various conspiracy theories (Mitchell et al., 2020 ); it is also highlighted that the use of social media is more likely related with a conspirational view of the world (Foley and Wagner, 2020). How do social networking platforms contribute to the spreading of conspiracy theories and fake news? Are active users of legacy media immune to fake news and conspiracies? Does the propensity to believe in conspiracies correlate with generally high levels of social media consumption? Does the frequent use of social media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, have some particular “platforms effects” on users? As a matter of fact, some researchers argue that the way in which information is presented, e.g. in both text and video formats, affect the way is received (Sydnor, 2018; Goldeberget al; 2019). This may suggest that the use of different social media platforms, such as Facebook and Youtube, may have different effects on users. This study aims to analyze how social media contribute to spread conspiracy theories in public opinion, and how their reception and use may activate a process of political subjectivation, favouring political engagement and participation of "netizens”. From a methodological point of view, in order to answer the research questions, I will consult specialist literature and ValCon Project surveys to analyze the use of social media by netizens from two European countries (Italy and France), around issues like the effectiveness of vaccines, the origin of the spread of Covid-19, the adherence and the opposition to pandemic containment policies, and the use of the EU Digital COVID Certificate by governments.

Il contrasto alla disinformazione rappresenta un pilastro fondamentale delle politiche di open government delle istituzioni europee per favorire la trasparenza delle azioni e la partecipazione dei cittadini. Le crisi multiple (Fabbrini 2017), la Brexit che ha acceso il dibattito sulla disintegrazione (Zielonka 2014), la diffusione di resistenze identitarie (Trenz, de Wilde 2009) e le diverse forme di euroscetticismo ( Sampugnaro 2015; Pasquinucci, Verzichelli, ed. 2016), hanno evidenziato una relazione critica con i cittadini e allo stesso tempo le preoccupazioni delle istituzioni sovranazionali di affrontare più efficacemente la questione. Già prima della pandemia, le molteplici crisi dell’Unione europea hanno stimolato le istituzioni, in particolare Commissione e Parlamento, a puntare su strategie e politiche riguardanti diverse dimensioni della comunicazione pubblica, evidenziando l'importanza di rafforzare il coinvolgimento dei cittadini e di frenare le pressioni euroscettiche. Inoltre, il Piano d’azione europeo per la democrazia (2020) afferma che cittadini impegnati, informati e responsabilizzati rappresentano la miglior garanzia per ripristinare la fiducia e costruire democrazie più resilienti. La disinformazione è la minaccia più recente, con importanti conseguenze sul dibattito pubblico e sulla partecipazione democratica. La disinformazione, infatti, erode la fiducia nelle istituzioni, ostacolando la capacità dei cittadini di assumere decisioni informate (Anderson, Rainie 2017; Belluati, Marini 2019; Eu Disinfolab 2020; Lovari 2020). La pandemia da Covid 19 ha esasperato le contraddizioni e manifestato i rischi del disordine informativo, ma può anche essere osservata come un’occasione per testare la capacità di reazione dei diversi attori: istituzioni, media, cittadini. A maggior ragione, l’attacco della Russia contro l’Ucraina, ha evidenziato l’impatto delle minacce ibride, compresa la disinformazione, e aperto un ulteriore, drammatico fronte per verificare la resilienza dell’Ue. Partendo da tali considerazioni, il contribuito intende indagare sulla capacità di resilienza dei giovani studenti universitari. Le giovani generazioni hanno subito più degli adulti gli effetti della crisi economica, attraverso un alto tasso di disoccupazione (Eurostat 2019, 2020) e sentimenti di ansia per il futuro. Inoltre, molti studiosi evidenziano un clevage generazionale (Norris, Inglehart 2019) con i giovani più europeisti rispetto agli adulti (Lubbers, Scheepers 2010; Lauterbacha, De Vriesb 2020; D'Ambrosi et. al. 2021; Parito et al. 2022). In questo contesto, ci chiediamo se i giovani con più alti livelli di istruzioni di Paesi membri dell’Unione con storie e culture differenti possano sviluppare risposte simili. In particolare se gli studenti dell'Europa centrale e dell'Europa meridionale utilizzino lo stesso quadro concettuale per osservare la realtà sociale, in particolare un European-based way of thinking che impatta sulla fiducia e sul senso di appartenenza nell'UE. Il paper presenta alcuni dati riguardanti una ricerca esplorativa e quantitativa con un questionario web-based su un campione non casuale di circa 1200 studenti universitari (età 18-25) in quattro paesi (Italia, Spagna, Polonia, Ungheria). L’ipotesi di partenza è che, di fronte alle più recenti crisi (pandemia e guerra in Ucraina), la percezione dell’impatto della disinformazione sia simile tra gli studenti universitari nonostante le differenze dei paesi d’origine. Le domande che guidano l’analisi sono: Quanto ha inciso la disinformazione sulle recenti emergenze nella percezione dell’Europa? come viene percepita la strategia di comunicazione dell'UE nel contrasto alle fake news e nella promozione di un’informazione di qualità? Come impattano queste azioni sui livelli di fiducia da parte dei giovani nelle istituzioni europee? Il nostro studio esplorativo sottolinea che il processo di comunicazione è cruciale per il coinvolgimento dei cittadini e per l'integrazione europea. In particolare i risultati mostrano che le misure adottate per combattere la disinformazione hanno influenzato il livello di fiducia nell'UE. Nonostante gli effetti negativi di queste crisi che hanno prodotto una significativa erosione della fiducia verso i governi nazionali, i giovani continuano a fidarsi dell'Ue (OCSE, 2020 Edelman 2022). Possiamo sostenere che la nuova generazione rimane più ottimista riguardo alle azioni dell'Ue rispetto ad altri gruppi di età, percependo positivamente le nuove strategie di comunicazione, in particolare l'approccio dal basso verso l'alto adottato per sostenere la protezione dei valori europei e dei sistemi democratici.

This paper explores the reasons for the tensions between populist radical right actors and their opponents, which the paper characterizes as an internally differentiated anti-populist bloc discursively held together by a few identifiable conceptual frames. It argues that although different in many respects, these anti-populist frames share a common rejection of conspiracy theories, which are instead embraced, albeit in an ambivalent and evolving manner, by populist actors. The paper focuses on the test case of confrontations by populists and anti-populists in plenaries of the European Parliament debating approaches to COVID-19. In addition, it considers differences between the views of civil society inspired movement-parties and other components of the anti-populist bloc.

Quali strategie adottare all’interno dei vari paesi dell’Unione Europea per un’azione di fact-checking che faccia da argine al fenomeno dilagante delle fake news? Il falso e il fake sono sempre esistiti, ma ad essere cambiata è la natura del fenomeno: è cambiata la modalità di rappresentazione del falso, che cerca di emulare la struttura delle notizie, fino a parlare in letteratura di «the fake news genre»; si è potenziato il processo di politicizzazione delle fake news; infine le dinamiche di creazione e propagazione risultano sempre più pervasive e fortemente accentuate all’interno degli ecosistemi mediali digitali, la cui evoluzione è scandita da processi come la datafication, la platformization e l’hybridization. È in questo mutato ecosistema che l’Unione Europea prova rispondere alla disinformazione con un approccio multilivello che cerca di integrare da un lato i piani locale (micro) nazionale (meso) e internazionale (macro), e allo stesso tempo di adottare una strategia multi-attore che punti all’ibridazione di competenze e a strategie di network sempre più consolidate, provando così a superare i principali limiti ed inefficienze delle pratiche di fact-checking e debunking. L’approccio multilevel promosso e adottato dall’UE trova il suo corrispettivo concreto nella creazione nel 2020 dell’European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), l’hub europeo per sostenere policy di contrasto alla disinformazione attraverso network di ricerca pubblica e privata per individuare soluzioni tecnologiche e costruire azioni micro-capillari di fact-checking in cui anche il ruolo della società civile diventa evidente e si integra nella strategia complessiva. Questo articolo, oltre a ricostruire da un punto di vista longitudinale le principali fasi di sviluppo e di azione legate alla messa terra della strategia multilevel, cerca di analizzare la sua effettiva operazionalizzazione all’interno del fact-checking network di EDMO, una comunità certificata di attori creata nel 2021, che conta 94 progetti di debunking dislocati tra i vari paesi dell’Unione. Accogliendo attori pubblici e privati, for profit e non-for-profit, appartenenti al settore dei media o indipendenti rispetto ai media mainstream e organizzazioni complesse e associazioni del terzo settore, la community EDMO può rappresentare un caso emblematico della multidimensionalità della strategia di debunking scelta dall’Unione. Ogni progetto è stato analizzato rispetto a 12 dimensioni che compongono il code book alla base dell’analisi di natura qualitativa, riconducibili rispettivamente a tre macrocategorie: due tese ad indagare la prospettiva multidimensionale, e la terza legata alla definizione della natura dell’azione di fact-checking. A queste va aggiunta una variabile di contesto, rappresentata dall’anno di creazione di ogni singolo progetto La prima categoria raggruppa le variabili legate alla dimensione multi-territoriale, rispettivamente: (2) il numero di progetti per singolo paese; (3) la traduzione dei contenuti verificati anche in altre lingue (in primo luogo l’inglese); (4) il livello di coverage delle notizie: micro (locale) meso (nazionale) macro (internazionale). La seconda categoria raggruppa le variabili legate alla dimensione multi-attore: (5) settore di appartenenza: pubblico o privato; (6) natura dell’organizzazione: for profit / non-profit; (7) progetto interno o esterno a media già esistenti: dipendenza o indipendenza del progetto; (8) presenza di professionalità diverse e integrazione di competenze; (9) maggiore o minore integrazione di più attori e delle relative strutture organizzative, (conseguente minore o maggiore complessità del network interno al progetto); (10) coinvolgimento della società civile / utenti della rete nel processo di fact-checking. Infine, la terza categoria mette in luce variabili legate alle pratiche di fact-checking: rispettivamente (11) Metodologia di verifica dei contenuti (12) Appartenenza all’International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) Data la natura esplorativa della ricerca si possono elencare alcuni risultati preliminari che permettono di ricostruire, almeno in parte, la configurazione della rete di fact-checkers di EDMO e alcune linee di tendenza: integrazione di dimensioni micro, meso e macro e di piccoli e grandi attori con diversi gradi di complessità organizzativa; integrazione tra attori di natura diversa: settore pubblico, sistema dei media, imprese profit e no profit, progetti indipendenti; integrazione tra ricerca pubblica e privata che si combinano nello sviluppo di tools e tecnologie avanzate di debunking; infine una presenza crescente del terzo settore, composto da attivismo di comunità e volontariato civico, dove le strategie di engagement e di coinvolgimento diretto della cittadinanza possono ricoprire un ruolo fondamentale nella lotta alla disinformazione.

Strategie di comunicazione e responsiveness: quali connessioni? Aurelia Zucaro Università della Calabria aurelia.zucaro@unical.it Abstract Come incide la comunicazione istituzionale sulla responsiveness? I governi, per dimostrare di essere ricettivi, come adeguano le strategie di comunicazione politica nei periodi di emergenza e nell’era dei social? Con la rivoluzione digitale la tecnologia sembra spingere verso strategie di comunicazione digitale, la cui predilezione a livello politico e anche governativo ha subìto un’impennata sostenuta dalle esigenze di distanziamento della crisi pandemica. Ma a quali condizioni tali strategie sono efficaci? Un fattore centrale è la conoscenza e l’uso dei media digitali da parte dei riceventi. Dunque, quanto maggiore e più diffusa è la conoscenza digitale tanto più ricorrenti le strategie digitali. È così? Ci sono altri fattori? Il presupposto è che i governi, per mantenere la loro popolarità sia durante le elezioni che nei periodi interelettorali, devono dare l’idea di essere ricettivi, pena la perdita del sostegno dei cittadini. La costruzione di tale percezione passa attraverso le strategie di comunicazione adottate da leader e partiti. L’attuazione delle strategie comunicative, a sua volta, chiama in causa il ruolo dei media all’interno della sfera pubblica e il loro eventuale coinvolgimento nei processi di persuasione (manifesta) o manipolazione (nascosta) dell’opinione pubblica (Morlino e Sorice 2021). In questo paper guardo a come si relazionano la responsivenss e le strategie di comunicazione in Italia, nelle tre grandi crisi degli anni duemila: quella terroristica del 2001, quella economica del 2008 e quella pandemica del 2020. L’obiettivo è controllare la presenza di una possibile connessione tra la “rappresentazione” delle politiche (Castells 2013), la soddisfazione per il sistema politico (democratico), le competenze digitali dei cittadini e l’efficacia dei media nel loro ruolo di controllo sul potere politico, in condizioni di straordinarietà. Per farlo, mi avvarrò dell’ausilio di dati (Eurobarometro, Eurostat, GSOD) su alcuni indicatori legati ai due concetti chiave del paper. Tali indicatori potranno includere: satisfaction with democracy (come indicatore di responsiveness), media integrity (come indicatore ponte), digital skills e media use (come indicatori di efficacia delle strategie di comunicazione). Il tentativo è dunque quello di rilevare i possibili legami che intercorrono tra il bisogno di risposte della società alle domande di interesse collettivo, il livello di responsiveness dei governi, inteso come cuore della rappresentanza politica in relazione alle altre dimensioni procedurali della democrazia (accountability e partecipazione) e le strategie di comunicazione adottate da questi ultimi nell’ottica di una “ricettività percepita”. Il ragionamento parte da una lettura teorica del concetto di responsiveness (Powell, Morlino, Memoli) indagato alla luce di una “quarta fase della comunicazione politica” (Davis 2019) caratterizzata dalla perenne dimensione della crisi, e si inoltra nell’analisi esplorativa dei dati rilevandone le prime evidenze empiriche.

During the recent financial crisis, many European countries opted for austerity measures in healthcare by retrenching public healthcare spending and thus reducing the state's role in provision of healthcare services. These austerity-driven policy changes have often strengthened or even generated new inequalities in access to healthcare across social groups, thus having profound consequences for solidarity and equality in healthcare and welfare state as a whole. However, little is known about how governments have framed these unpopular welfare choices and in particular, how they have framed policy reforms that target specific social groups (e.g. health policies that abolish free access to primary care for specific income or age groups). The paper investigates the framing of these health policy reforms in the context of the recent financial crisis by asking the following questions: How have governments framed austerity-driven healthcare reforms in the context of recent financial crisis? Which arguments have they used to justify these measures? The paper relies upon qualitative analysis of government discourse in three countries that introduced extensive austerity-driven health reforms during the recent financial crisis: Portugal, Ireland and Greece. Data used in the paper are original and have been collected through text analysis of political and policy content of the government's parliamentary speeches on austerity-driven healthcare reforms in the three countries. The paper will present preliminary results on cross-country comparison of government discourse in the three countries.

Tra il 2020 e il 2022, due crisi di livello globale hanno contribuito a ridefinire il concetto stesso di emergenza nel panorama informativo. In linea con la teoria classica del newsmaking, tanto il riconoscimento della natura di minaccia concreta e globale della pandemia di Covid-19 tra gennaio e febbraio 2020 quanto la scelta della Russia di far precipitare anni di tensioni in un’operazione militare contro l’Ucraina nel tardo febbraio 2022 rappresentano due classici “tigger events” (Cobb and Elder, 1972). Segnano l’inizio di una situazione altamente notiziabile, riconoscendo un singolo evento come “innesco” di tale situazione e ponendo l’attenzione non tanto su di esso quanto sugli sviluppi successivi; in questo quadro, il sistema delle news genera un’amplificazione dell’attenzione sul tema che non si esaurisce in un unico picco di attenzione ma si dimostra in grado di prolungarsi, se necessario replicarsi a partire da trigger events assimilabili, persino realizzare forme di serializzazione. Partendo dal presupposto che i processi di newsmaking sono, almeno in parte, una forma di costruzione sociale (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993), la riflessione accademica sul tema ha proseguito inquadrando criticamente i trigger events, caratterizzandoli come non necessariamente appartenenti al novero degli eventi “puri” che animano la realtà empirica, e comprendendo un vasto ventaglio di pseudo-eventi costruiti dai media o dagli attori politici con l’intento di influenzare l’agenda (Bennett, 2003). Da ciò derivano posizioni come quella di Vasterman, il quale sostiene che i media hypes possono “essere definiti come un'ondata di notizie generata dai media, legata a un evento specifico e ampliata dai processi di auto-rinforzo all'interno della produzione di notizie dei media” (2005: 515). A partire da queste assunzioni teoriche, si è sviluppata una ricca letteratura che, riconoscendo criticamente il concetto di media hype come in bilico tra il “naturale” prodotto della routine giornalistica e lo strumento principe di operazioni di manipolazione dell’agenda, mira a riconoscere il ruolo dell’ampliamento e dell’innesco dei processi di auto-rinforzo sopra citati nella produzione di ulteriori fasi di sviluppo di un tema, e di capacità di quel tema di generare e rinnovare conflitti di agenda (Birkland 1997; Boydstun 2013). È all’interno di questo framework teorico che si muovono, ad esempio, ricerche volte a individuare il ruolo “politico” della copertura di temi legati ad esempio all’immigrazione in un contesto di campagna elettorale: ne è un chiaro esempio il caso di Macerata e le modalità in cui, come emerge dall’analisi di Bonerba et al. (2019), la sua trattazione ha “saturato lo spazio di trattazione del tema immigrazione, per poi trascinarlo a livelli più elevati del periodo precedente ai fatti scatenanti” (Marini, 2021). Ma la saturazione mediale generata da due trigger events che per origine e portata chiamano il sistema dei media a produrre inquadramenti diversi degli sviluppi delle rispettive emergenze, con un margine di intervento tutto sommato limitato, portano due grandi interrogativi in questo ambito di ricerca. Il primo si lega alla gestione mediale dello sviluppo della situazione emergenziale, e alle modalità in cui, all’insorgere dell’emergenza bellica, quella sanitaria sia costretta a individuare una “nicchia” di agenda nella quale proseguire il proprio sviluppo. Il secondo riguarda la molteplicità di temi che la “monopolizzazione dell’agenda” condotta dalla pandemia di Covid- 19 prima, e dal conflitto russo-ucraino poi, si trovano costretti ad abitare altrettante “nicchie” informative. Immigrazione, sicurezza, politiche del lavoro, polarizzazione ideologica nel rinnovato continuum destra-sinistra, sono tutti temi che il perdurante stato di emergenza ha costretto a inserirsi carsicamente nelle narrazioni informative di questi tre anni di crisi perpetua; individuare i contorni di queste sub-narrazioni può tuttavia rappresentare un utile strumento per affrontare le prossime occasioni in cui media e politica avranno tutto l’interesse a tornare a manipolare l’agenda pubblica, a partire dal prossimo appuntamento per la campagna elettorale 2023. Il paper che qui si presenta intende affrontare il tema dell’interdipendenza tra condizioni di contesto e le rappresentazioni mediali e discorsive delle situazioni di crisi attraverso i due nodi sopra menzionati, mettendo a valore due output di ricerca. Da un lato, la ricostruzione dei “mondi narrativi” dell’informazione televisiva operata grazie ai dati dell’Osservatorio TG in collaborazione tra il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza Università di Roma e l’Istituto EURISPES. Un esercizio di sistematizzazione dei dati relativi all’anno 2020 è già stato operato da chi scrive (Ruggiero, 2021), con un focus specifico sulle “prove di sostituzione mediatica” che hanno riguardato in particolare il tema delle migrazioni (Bruno, 2021). I dati a disposizione consentono un fruttuoso confronto sulle modalità di “monopolizzazione” dell’agenda operate nel 2020 dalla pandemia di Covid-19 e nel 2022 dal conflitto russo-ucraino, con particolare attenzione ai primi tre mesi di coverage a partire dai rispettivi trigger events (Osservatorio TG, 2022). La possibilità di ampliare il focus dell’analisi, mantenendo ferma l’impostazione per cui una simile analisi ben si situa entro i confini del mainstream informativo, viene da una ricerca proposta dalla Fondazione sul Giornalismo “Paolo Murialdi”, che focalizza l’attenzione sulla narrazione dell’emergenza bellica sulle maggiori testate italiane (Corriere della Sera e Repubblica). L’intento è quello di applicare la medesima strategia di indagine, centrata sui titoli delle edizioni di prima serata dei sette Tg nazionali e su quelli delle edizioni a stampa delle due testate considerate: un’analisi lessicometrica realizzata attraverso l’utilizzo di un’interfaccia di R utile all’analisi multidimensionale dei testi, nota come IRaMuTeQ (http://www.iramuteq.org); in particolare, grazie alle funzionalità di analisi statistico-testuale offerte dal software, sarà possibile individuare i principali gruppi semantici del corpus analizzato e le specificità testuali dei titoli di ogni singola testata. Riferimenti bibliografici F. Baumgartner, B. Jones (1993), Agendas and Instability in American Politics. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. R.W. Bennett (2003), Talking it Through: Puzzles of American Democracy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. T.A. Birkland (1997), After Disaster. Agenda setting, Public policy, and Focusing Events, Georgetown University Press, Washington. G. Bonerba, M. Gerli, R. Marini, S. Verza (2019), L’omicidio e la sparatoria. Le logiche mediali nel “caso Macerata”, in S. Bentivegna, G. Boccia Artieri (a cura di), Niente di nuovo sul fronte mediale. Agenda pubblica e campagna elettorale, FrancoAngeli, Milano. A.E. Boydstun (2013), Making the News. Politics, the Media, and the Agenda Setting, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. M. Bruno (2021), Prove di sostituzione tematica. Il topic mediale delle migrazioni nell’anno della pandemia, in C. Ruggiero (a cura di), Il virus nell'informazione. I telegiornali italiani nell'anno della pandemia, FrancoAngeli, Milano. R. Cobb, C. Elder (1972), Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda Building, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. R. Marini (2021), Le emergenze dell'immigrazione e i media: tra riflessioni critiche e revisione epistemologica, in Cosmopolis, n.1. Osservatorio Tg (2022), Crisi scaccia crisi?, Rapporto Osservatorio Tg settembre 2021 – giugno 2022. C. Ruggiero (2021, a cura di), Il virus nell'informazione. I telegiornali italiani nell'anno della pandemia, FrancoAngeli, Milano. P.L.M. Vasterman, (2005) Media-Hype: Self-Reinforcing News Waves, Journalistic Standards and the Construction of Social Problems, in European Journal of Communication, Vol. 20(4): 508–30. C. Wien, C. Elmelund-Præstekær (2009), An Anatomy of Media Hypes Developing a Model for the Dynamics and Structure of Intense Media Coverage of Single Issues, in European Journal of Communication, Vol 24(2): 183–201.

The results of a research conducted on the presence of religious symbols in Italian advertisements between the 1950s and early 2020s have revealed two main trends. The first one is that commercial advertising in Italy generally increased its use of religious symbols over time, while the second trend concerns the employment of such symbolism in connection with a variety of cultural values ranging from craving for admiration to self-satisfaction, collective sharing and reliability. This has been interpreted as evidence of the fact that religious symbols increasingly shift between the religious and economic spheres, which makes them less exclusively pertinent to the religious field. It is now interesting to enquire whether and how this phenomenon can be traced back in time, exploring it through the advertisements circulated in Italy from the early 1910s to the end of the 1940s. This is a period in which Italian advertisers stop making references to the late 19th-century bourgeois culture and, in line with the social and economic transformations of the time, propose a consumer culture centered on, mostly national, collective values rather than individual ones which the industrial, mass-production-based development was starting to stimulate over those years. Through a content analysis of a large sample of advertising billboards drawn from some of the most important Italian advertising archives, the paper examines the main commercial uses of religious symbolism between the two World Wars and identifies major similarities and differences with respect to what has already been observed over the last 70 years.

The status of scientific knowledge became a central issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. As citizens turned to their governments for guidance, the latter often relied on groups of experts to navigate the crisis. However, the implementation of science-based limitations became a battlefield for various communities, most notably religious ones. While the picture of Pope Francis praying alone in an empty square symbolized the Catholic Church’s support to state regulations, President Bolsonaro’s call for a national day of fasting and prayer to “free Brazil from this evil” underscored the government’s reliance on evangelical doctrine. Starting from these considerations, the present study investigates the newsfeed of a major Brazilian religious organization (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God) and argues that its discourse around the COIVD-19 outbreak shifted strategically towards the anti-scientific positions expressed by the government. Accordingly, the study employs Text Mining and Network Text Analysis to semantically map the entire news production of this religious organization over the first two years of the pandemic. Early findings indicate that, in a context of global crisis, extreme positions might be strategically adopted by religious groups to expand and legitimize their influence, leading to a polarization centred around the social value of scientific knowledge.

What relationship has been established between Islam and politics in Italy? Starting from 2001, even in our country there was a sudden change in political and journalistic communication on religion and foreigners, which would mark the next two decades. Islam, which until then in the collective imagination represented an exotic and almost unknown religious phenomenon, quickly became the focus of xenophobic communications that, at the national and local level, adapted and innovated argumentative models already in use to stigmatize ethnic minorities of foreign origin. For the first time in the history of Italian republic, religion becomes a negative trait of individual identity. In Turin, today considered by several authors to be a "laboratory" for policies of recognition and inclusion, in a few weeks mosques and imams became the subject of political interpellations and newspaper articles. Their status shifted from that of places of worship and sociability, mostly marginal in urban public and political life, to illegal spaces and secret hideouts of terrorist organizations. The definition of Islam as a public threat fueled a political business based on fear, making instrumental use of minorities to create space for electoral representation. Unlike other cities, under pressure from the local political majority, Turin's public institutions initiate a path of rapprochement and mutual recognition, involving Islamic communities and associations and enabling the emergence and regularization of existing spaces of prayer. Through archival survey, documentary analysis and semi-structured and in-depth interviews with protagonists and privileged witnesses, covering a thirty-year time span, the contribution reconstructs the political action of majority and minority, showing how Islam represented a key symbolic resource for opposition parties, and how collaboration between local government and religious organizations played a central role in the consolidation of Islamic communities in Turin.

Lo spazio pubblico non è la sfera pubblica, che è composta fondamentalmente di enunciati. È uno spazio reale, fatto di asfalto e pietre, uno spazio attraversato per lo più da persone anonime, in cui vigono le regole della disattenzione civile (Goffman 1977), o destinato alla mobilità veicolare ma che, all’occorrenza, può fare da sfondo ad eventi collettivi: incontri sportivi, celebrazioni, e manifestazioni, che possono essere o meno autorizzate. Da un punto di vista urbanistico, lo spazio pubblico nasce per soddisfare esigenze specifiche legate all’avvento della città (mercati, creazione di un “pubblico”). Inoltre, è uno spazio controllato, normato, il cui uso deve soddisfare alcuni requisiti: ad esempio, si deve essere autorizzati dall’amministrazione competente, e deve essere garantito l’ordine pubblico. Esso è anche un’arena in cui s’ingaggiano lotte e competizioni, per occuparne abusivamente i lembi, le zone liminali, a prescindere dai diktat dell’autorità, o per organizzare eventi non autorizzati che quasi sempre si concludono con l’arrivo della polizia. È anche il luogo della movida (Cristofori 2021), degli eccessi del sabato sera, dei dissapori tra residenti e avventori. C’è un altro elemento importante da tenere in considerazione: lo spazio pubblico è uno spazio urbano, plastico, malleabile, che è destinato a vivere un processo di riconfigurazione e risignificazione continua. Insomma, è più utile studiare l’ecologia dello spazio pubblico, l’ecologia socio-culturale che ivi viene permessa. Tutto ciò tenendo a mente che lo spazio pubblico è il luogo dove nascono e maturano soggetti collettivi (partiti, movimenti, religioni). Differentemente, lo spazio virtuale è uno spazio ibrido: consente la visibilità e l’accesso ai contenuti, ma le sue dimensioni potenzialmente infinite stemperano lo scontro, lo riducono a semplici battibecchi. Spesso i dissidenti, coloro che non condividono certi contenuti, si limitano a crearne di nuovi. Internet può sensibilizzare, incentivare, veicolare, ma non è mai la posta in gioco; è una semplice matrice, una grammatica che consente la produzione di un numero pressoché infinito di “enunciati”. Lo spazio pubblico ha senso solo se è delimitato, se vi sono dei confini che ne definiscono l’ampiezza. Non è un caso che sia nella città, con i suoi luoghi pubblici, che avvengono le rivoluzioni, nelle società agricole si hanno solo rivolte. Molti dei migranti giunti nelle nostre città sono stati fortemente criticati per il modo in cui hanno utilizzato gli spazi pubblici. L’argomento è assai complesso e non può essere sciorinato in questo contesto. Basti ricordare che molti migranti vivevano e tuttora vivono in dimore non idonee, anguste, sovraffollate. Lo spazio pubblico sopperisce al bisogno di socializzare, di ritrovarsi e condividere. Purtroppo, la loro presenza non passa inosservata e genera malumori di vario tipo nei residenti storici. Ma, da parte dei migranti, vi è anche lo sforzo di organizzare forme di presenza più “rispettabili” e “riconosciute”. È qui che subentra la religione. I risultati che espongo in questa relazione sono il frutto di dieci anni di ricerca e di una lunga etnografia, durata cinque anni, svoltasi tra Perugia e Roma. Mi sono concentrato sulla diaspora peruviana e sulle forme di devozione che hanno introdotto in Italia. A Perugia risiedono diverse migliaia di Peruviani e alcuni anni fa hanno fatto giungere a Perugia la copia di un affresco, presente a Lima. L’affresco ritrae il cristo crocifisso e venne eseguito nel XVII secolo da un angolano; è il Signore dei Miracoli. Lima venne colpita da devastanti terremoti, ma la parete che ospitava il murale rimase in piedi; per questo motivo l’immagine divenne miracolosa. Con l’esplosione della diaspora peruviana, a partire dagli anni 1980, copie dell’immagine, considerata portentosa, accompagnarono molti peruviani. Quando l’immigrazione si consolidò, verso gli anni 2000, molte comunità di fedeli vollero introdurre questa forma di venerazione nelle città italiane (Paerregaard 2008). A riguardo va fatta una premessa. A Lima vengono svolte tre processioni, nel mese di ottobre. In terra straniera la pratica devozionale ha dovuto inevitabilmente accettare alcuni compromessi. A Perugia, se si esclude qualche uscita che ha avuto luogo nel corso di altre feste liturgiche importanti, le processioni svolte a ottobre sono due. La prima, avviene nei primi giorni di ottobre, e attraversa corso Vannucci. La seconda si svolge a San Sisto, un quartiere periferico, importante poiché lì si trova la chiesa che ospita la copia dell’immagine ed è sempre in quella zona che vivono molti peruviani. La processione consiste nel far sfilare un fercolo addobbato di fiori, sul quale è adagiata l’immagine. Il fercolo è sorretto dai membri della confraternita, che in quel giorno vestono una tunica viola, e vengono anticipati, nel loro lento incedere, dai canti delle loro correligionarie, sempre vestite di viola; esse non si limitano a cantare; camminando all’indietro, gli occhi puntati sempre verso il cristo; esse reggono gli incensieri che riempiono le vie d’un profumo piacevole, intenso. A volte il corteo si ferma, e i bambini vengono sollevati e posti di fronte all’immagine, essi vengono così introdotti al culto. In Italia, la prima processione ha un significato soprattutto politico. Infatti “visita” e “omaggia”, tramite la pratica dell’inchino, i Palazzi e i Monumenti in cui risiedono le Istituzioni più importanti della città. Per i peruviani questa non è la processione più importante; rappresenta soprattutto una richiesta di riconoscimento e di inclusione. La costruzione di un soggetto collettivo; è una processione in cui sono spesso presenti le autorità ecclesiastiche e politiche, e che si conclude con una messa nel Duomo. Terminata la messa, i fedeli si disperdono. Ben diverso il clima che si respira nel corso della seconda processione, guidata da un sacerdote sudamericano. Essa è più lunga attraversa diverse strade del quartiere che ospita l’immagine. È la festa centrale, tanto che il momento liturgico, che si conclude con la messa, lascia poi spazio ai festeggiamenti. I devoti si ritrovano in un luogo in cui si consumano cibi e bevande e si svolgono spettacoli neofolklorici. È l’occasione per celebrano un’”intimità culturale” che contribuisce a costruire un senso di comunità e di località (Appadurai 2002, Herzfeldt 2003). Le due processioni hanno due significati diversi, ma ambedue occupano lo spazio pubblico, un’occupazione che presuppone una dirigenza peruviana forte e un robusto sistema di alleanze. Ci vuole l’avallo del vescovo, il permesso dell’amministrazione locale. Ciò che deve essere enfatizzato è la capacità di creare un’infrastruttura devozionale che rende possibile il culto, che avviene nello spazio pubblico, che crea disagio, ma che contribuisce alla costruzione di un soggetto collettivo. Va ribadito che durante le processioni non vengono espresse “opinioni” se non l’esigenza di accogliere lo straniero, di essere più inclusivi; le uniche parole che si possono udire vengono spesso pronunciate da chierici italiani. Anzi, il dispositivo processionale è intriso di tensioni simboliche (tra chiesa ufficiale e pietà popolare). E proprio la processione è un dispositivo in cui vengono esplicitati i rapporti di forza tra Chiesa e devozione popolare. Ma il risultato più importante ottenuto da questa pratica è la conquista di uno spazio di legittimazione; la possibilità di occupare lecitamente lo spazio pubblico, uno spazio intrinsecamente complesso dove è continua la lotta tra ciò che è lecito farvi e ciò che vi è proibito. Non solo, vi è una continua lotta per l’occupazione dello spazio pubblico (quando viene allestito un mercato, ad esempio, la libera circolazione delle auto viene impedita). Certo, una processione è un evento, ha un inizio e una fine. Una volta cessata, gli spazi che erano stati occupati riprendono le loro funzioni usuali (mobilità, passeggio). Tutt’al più vi è un processo di stratificazione storica, un accumularsi di impieghi legittimi dello spazio pubblico. La processione è un evento effimero, ha una durata limitata, ma, per i peruviani, consente di “addomesticare” simbolicamente la città, di renderla più accogliente, più “protetta”. Né va dimenticato che la copia presente a Perugia è sempre accessibile, a San Sisto. E viene spesso visitata. Inoltre, ogni processione crea dei ricordi virtuali, che permangono negli smartphone, o in internet e che producono una memoria condivisa. Foto e video contribuiscono alla creazione di veri e propri quadri della memoria in cui inserire le proprie vicende personali. Sono alcuni degli indizi che consentono di costruire una autobiografia, una storia che possa essere narrata. Il culto non serve ad esprimere opinioni in merito a specifici argomenti, consente un riposizionamento esistenziale, la costruzione di una presenza, il consolidamento di alleanze, e l’occupazione lecita dello spazio pubblico, che si contrappone all’uso illecito di aree liminali, e indica la maturità raggiunta dai peruviani presenti a Perugia. Non solo, la presenza pubblica dei peruviani sancisce l’uscita da quegli ambiti domestici, intimi, privati, nei quali spesso si svolge la loro attività. Certo, parliamo di una maturità aiutata dalla Chiesa ufficiale, ma spesso agita autonomamente, A questo serve lo spazio pubblico, a rendere evidente la conquista di un potere, ibrido, instabile, forse illusorio, un potere però che può simbolicamente lenire e sublimare le sofferenze legate alla vicenda migratoria. Appadurai, A. (2002) Modernità in polvere, Meltemi. Cristofori, C. (a cura di) (2021) Andar di notte. Viaggio nella movida delle città medie, Qodlibet. Goffman E. (1977) La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione, Il Mulino. Herzfeldt (2003) Intimità culturale, L’ancora del mediterraneo. Paerreggard K. (2008) Peruvians Dispersed. A Global Ethnography of migration. Lexington Books

This paper will discuss the circulation of religious symbols in the public sphere, by focusing on religious symbols used by non-religious actors (Nardella 2015) in the context of cultural productions and political mobilizations related to LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights. First, it will focus on cases from the arts field, addressing controversies over the aesthetic representation of the sacred and public responses to art that is perceived to be blasphemous. In these cases (based in Bologna and Milan), the definition of what counts as sacred is threatened by the use of religious symbols to intervene in the politics of sexuality debate. Secondly, the paper will offer a preliminary mapping of the use of religious symbols in protest actions in the arena of marriage equality and abortion rights in Italy. The relationship between political protest and religious culture, is increasingly heated and polarized when LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights are the object of contention. Religious symbols are here used, on both sides, as an instrument of distinction that serves instrumentally the political agenda of opposing camps.

In literature, there has long been talk of an increase in the visibility of religion in the public sphere, which can be traced back to 11th September 2001 when the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers helped to bring out in the public debate - starting from the United States - the dark side of religion, the one connected to extremist forces and terrorist phenomena, as well as new questions of faith (Lincoln 2010). It is a debate that affects the relations between religion, politics and society, both nationally and internationally. The historical moment we are experiencing - characterized by populist pressures in various countries of the world, by the shock of the crisis decreed by Covid-19, as well as by the most recent Russia-Ukraine war which has contributed to exacerbate the sense of uncertainty and precariousness - seems to give further oxygen to the debate by reinvigorating the public role of religion in our societies so calling into question academics all over the world who deal with religion and who are today faced with new questions. As also argued by Herbert (2011, 2020) who elaborates the concept of “religious publicization”, in this process a relevant role is played by the media, whose relationship with religion has become an increasingly investigated research topic over the past 15 years (Hoover 2006; Campbell 2010). In this regard, the academic community has for some years hypothesized a "new visibility" of religion supported by an increase in quantitative terms of journalistic coverage (Knott et al. 2013; Hjelm 2015; Lövheim, Lindermann 2015). A key concept within this line of research is that of the mediatization of religion (Hjarvard 2008, 2012), according to which religion is increasingly subsumed into a media logic (Altheide, Snow 1979), so that the media become the primary arena of religion’s visibility. In this sense, it is necessary consider some general characteristics of the media systems and some mechanisms that define their functioning (Cobb, Elder 1972; Gans 1979, 2011; Petrocik 1996; Marini 2011; Sorrentino 2007). However, while the public visibility of religion in the media has recently become a topic of great interest at international level, in Italy the literature on this topic is quite scarce. Only a few studies take into account the Italian case by comparing it with other national contexts, but mostly on specific issues at the center of the debate. In this regard, Lo?vheim (2019) made an effort to perform a systematic review of the studies on the new visibility of religion from a diachronic perspective, referring to various surveys carried out mainly in some northern European countries. The Swedish scholar also includes Italy for the first time, citing a study carried out by Ozzano and Giorgi (2016) on the relationship between religion and politics through the analysis of the debate in the media on "religious and ethical issues", such as bioethical, LGBT rights and multiculturalism ones. The synthesis proposed by Lövheim frames the Italian case within the trends that have also emerged in other Northern European countries regarding a presence of religion in the media to a greater extent than in the past. With the exception of this study, there is therefore a lack of systematic researches that can confirm or deny this trend in depth in the Italian context. In particular, there is no study that can support, or on the contrary, refute the hypothesis of a greater visibility of religion in the Italian public space capable of bring out continuities and differences over time. Italy may be of particular interest due to the central role played by the Catholic Church which over time has led several scholars to speak of the exceptional nature of the Italian case. In Italy religion is made visible mainly by the historical presence of the Catholic Church, which, despite the changed socio-political context and the transformations of the media system, does not seem to have lost its capacity to intervene publicly. In this framework, the present study intends to fill this gap by proposing a longitudinal study analyzing the coverage of the Catholic Church on the main Italian print newspapers in the last 17 years, from 2005 to 2021. We hypothesize that, contrary to what happens in other countries, in Italy we cannot speak of a greater visibility of religion, in particular of a greater visibility of the Catholic Church today than in the past, nor of a uniformity with respect to the way in which is spoken about it. We assumed that the Catholic Church continues to have a stand in the public debate but in a different way both in terms of issues on which it is legitimate to intervene and on religious actors who are called to participate in the debate. The study is part of an ongoing project and the intention is first of all purposely descriptive in order to fill the existing gap in the literature describing how public presence of the Catholic Church has evolved and changed in the last seventeen years. The wide time span under investigation allows to highlight continuity and differences considering both exogenous and endogenous changes intervened over time: 1) the transformations that have affected the media system, 2) the political and social transformations of recent years, 3) the internal changes of the Catholic Church organization (three popes, three different Italian Conference Bishops’ presidencies, as well as the processes of communication reform such as that relating to the Vatican communication of 2015). The choice to analyze the print press is mainly dictated by the need to deepen the presence of the Catholic Church on a media outlet capable of guaranteeing continuity of coverage over such a wide period (which is in fact not possible for web and digital born newspapers). To this aim, we have analyzed all the articles published by four of the main Italian newspapers (Il Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Giornale) in the last seventeen years (from 2005 to 2021) which contained, in the title or within the text, at least one of a list of keywords related to the Catholic Church. The articles were collected through the Factiva - Dow Jones and Volopress databases. In total, 211,368 articles were collected and analyzed through QDA Miner, a program for the qualitative analysis of texts, and WordStat, a text mining tool used to identify the most recurring themes within a corpus of articles. The analysis allowed to highlighting the actors of the Catholic Church who have had a greater voice in the public debate in the considered years and the main issues on which the Catholic Church has over time been entitled to intervene to emphasize continuity and differences. The study thus made it possible to establish how the public role of the Catholic Church – and of religion at least – has changed in Italy over the years. REFERENCES Altheide, D.L., Snow, R.P. (1979). Media Logic. London: Sage. Campbell, H. (2010). When Religion Meets New Media. London: Routledge. Cobb, R. W. and Elder C. D. (1972). The dynamics of agenda-building. Classics of Public Policy. Gans, H. J. (1979). Deciding what's news: A study of CBS evening news. NBC nightly. Herbert, D.E. (2011). Theorizing Religion and Media in Contemporary Societies: An Account of Religious ‘Publicization’. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(6). Herbert, D.E. (2020). Religion and Society. In J. Haynes (Ed.) Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics. London: Routledge. Hjarvard, S. (2008). The Mediatization of Religion: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Religious Change. Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook, 6(1). Hjarvard, S. (2012). Three Forms of Mediatized Religion: Changing the Public Face of Religion. In S. Hjarvard, M. Lo?vheim (Eds.) Mediatization and Religion. Go?teborg: Nordicom. Hjelm, T. (Ed.) (2015). Is God Back?: Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion. New York: Bloomsbury. Hoover, S.M. (2006). Religion in the Media Age. London: Routledge. Knott, K., Poole, E., Taira, T. (2013). Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred: Representation and Change. London: Routledge. Lincoln, B. (2010). Holy terrors: Thinking about religion after September 11, University of Chicago Press. Lo?vheim, M. (2019). Culture, Conflict and Constitutional Right: Representations of Religion in the Daily Press. In B. Schewel, E. K. Wilson (Eds.) Religion and European Society: A Primer. London: Wiley. Lo?vheim, M., Lindermann, A. (2015). Media, Religion and Modernity: Editorials and Religion in Swedish Daily Press. In T. Hjelm (Ed.) Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion. New York: Bloomsbury. Marini R (ed.) (2011). Altri flussi. La comunicazione politica della società civile. Milano: Guerini. Ozzano, L., Giorgi, A. (2016). European Culture Wars and the Italian Case: Which Side Are You On, London: Routledge. Petrocik, J. R. (1996). Issue ownership in presidential elections, with a 1980 case study. American journal of political science, 825-850. Sorrentino, C. (2007). Tutto fa notizia: leggere il giornale, capire il giornalismo, Roma, Carocci.

Oggi, in Europa, la comunità musulmana è uno dei bersagli più colpiti dai discorsi d’odio promossi online e offline da un certo tipo di retorica e propaganda politica conservatrice e populista. Negli ultimi anni, infatti, partiti di destra e/o xenofobi, hanno costruito la narrazione dell’emergenza migratoria, utilizzando i linguaggi dell'invasione, della criminalizzazione del migrante e dell’etnicizzazione dell’islam, ovvero associando al migrante l’immagine del musulmano-fondamentalista. La presentazione proposta tenta di ricostruire, tramite il confronto di alcune ricerche sul tema, alcuni degli aspetti del processo di stereotipizzazione dell’islam in Europa e in Italia e come tali narrazioni d’odio (hate speech) si muovano senza soluzioni di continuità tra lo spazio online e offline, con ricadute politiche e sociali in entrambi gli ambienti. Infine, alla luce di alcune evidenze originali, si cercherà di proporre una riformulazione della definizione del termine hate speech, e di islamofobia, per riflettere su nuove proposte di intervento.