SISP Conference 2023

As the issues of food sovereignty have recently revamped the priority of local and national markets, this contribution questions the autarky imposed by the fascist regime in the second half of the 1930s. Autarky implied an economic policy that aimed to promote domestic production and reduce imports of raw materials. In the official discourse of the regime, this policy was introduced as a response to the economic sanctions that the League of Nations applied to Italy after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. However, as this research intends to demonstrate, the peculiarity of the autarkic experience in the Italian culture is not to be sought directly in the protectionist policies, but in the forms of aestheticization of such policies, as the field of fashion eloquently reveals. By relying on a historical-interpretative analysis that frames fascism as a ‘political variant of modernism’ (Griffin 2007: 6), this contribution focuses on the construction of a ‘mystique’ around the industrial and colonial surrogates of the most expensive raw materials, on the background of the well-known rhetoric of poor but beautiful and ingenious Italy. The analysis focuses on the strategies of fashion in implementing this political programme and, above all, on the plurality of tactics of resistance and explicit disobedience to autarky. On the one hand, there is the heroic discourse of the regime on how to bend nature to achieve self-sufficiency, but, on the other hand, there is a more subtle and intriguing poetic of the fortuitous discovery of new materials. This the case of the Italian shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo, who gave life to a metaphysical perception of reality, in accordance with the poetics of Surrealism in Europe at the time. In summary, the contribution intends to challenge the common assumption that sees fashion as the most beautiful expression of power, also showing its politically active role and transformative potential.

Following the literature on fashion cities, the main purpose of the article is to draw out fashion's role in shaping the process of production of public policies. Thereupon, this work intends to show that fashion may be considered as a proper category of public action : in this sense, it constitutes an optimum gauge also to measure its evolution within the Italian peninsula. On the one hand, the piece specifically analyzes the place and meaning of fashion within the political discourses (1980-2020). It is argued that the latter has been used by policymakers to implement creative neoliberal policies. It also highlights that the association of fashion with the imaginary of cultural and creative (urban) ‘milieu’ was used by local municipalities to give coherence to political decisions, making them more ‘readable’ in the eyes of citizens (and electors). On the other hand, fashion is perceived here as a part of politicians’ performances. The study of the settlement of Italian fashion museums allows us to confirm the significant role of fashion in triggering cultural policies. The promotion of public-owned fashion entities and museums constitutes one of the most significant elements through which the fashion industry is progressively gaining relevance. Our analysis includes the identification of the distinctive policy features that have allowed the emergence of certain cities as fashion cities within a highly competitive national urban-framework. Rooted in extensive archival research, the methodological approach also combines participatory and semi-participatory observations and in-depth semi-directive interviews with local public and private actors. The data were collected within the framework of our (ongoing) PhD research (2019-2022). The results of this study reveal the importance of fashion in fostering the attractiveness of ‘urban loci’ and in creating new market opportunities for cities. The main finding of the article is that over the last decades, fashion has gone beyond its materialistic and aesthetic endeavors by playing a significant role in the definition of political agendas acting - by extension - as a proper category of public action.

Does the dress of politicians matter to Polish voters? Are there any differences in assigning importance to appearance depending on the political party and views one supports? Are there other factors influencing how different groups of polish voters attach importance to appearance and fashion issues to politicians? What impact do their clothes and appearance have on the perception of Polish politicians? What features are attributed to them based on fashion elements? These questions will be asked in the study carried out in the period preceding the parliamentary elections that will take place in Poland in October 2023. The proposed paper will present the results of the research.

La condivisione di alcuni macro-temi trasversali sia a candidati e partiti di posizioni politiche opposte sia a cittadini di diversi orientamenti politici è stata una delle novità della campagna elettorale del 2022. In particolare, i temi legati alla crisi economica nelle sue varie declinazioni (carovita, caro bollette, inflazione, costo dell’energia, contrasto alla povertà, ecc.) si sono distinti come issues sia al centro dell’agenda dei legacy media sia al centro delle preoccupazioni dei cittadini e rispetto alle quali gli stessi soggetti politici hanno cercato di attivarsi pur senza riuscire a costruirsi una vera ownership (Bentivegna, Marchetti, Roncarolo, 2023). Questi temi sono inevitabilmente rilevanti per i cittadini perché si riferiscono a bisogni del vivere quotidiano, ovvero temi di cui le persone hanno un’esperienza di prima mano anche indipendentemente dalla copertura dei media (obtrusive issues) (Demers et al. 1989; Shafi 2017; Vonbun e Kleinen-von Königslöw 2016). Accanto a essi non sono però mancati temi più di “nicchia” (aborto, cambiamento climatico, ecc.), tipicamente relativi a forme di responsabilizzazione collettiva dell’individuo, coinvolgenti in termini ideali, ma non necessariamente ancorati al vissuto materiale individuale e dei quali pertanto solo una parte di cittadini ha esperienza diretta (semi-obtrusive issues) (Marini 2006; Shafi 2017). Durante la campagna elettorale 2022, questi temi sono circolati all’interno dei social media, un ambiente sempre più centrale nella dieta mediale dei cittadini (Newman et al. 2021), sebbene in misura inferiore rispetto alle obtrusive issues (es. carovita, contrasto alla povertà). Queste issues, come si vedrà, in molti casi sono anche estremamente controverse e legate a principi e opinioni forti e contrastanti da parte degli individui. Proprio questa natura controversa amplia il tipo di attori che ne discutono sui social media, andando oltre la cerchia tradizionale delle testate giornalistiche e degli attori politici. Il tema del diritto all’aborto, per esempio, è stato introdotto nel dibattito da una tra le più famose influencer, Chiara Ferragni, che intervenendo all’interno dei social media ha dato il via a un’ampia discussione che ha coinvolto soggetti legati all’attivismo sociale e gruppi politici autorganizzati che hanno diffuso frame fortemente identitari sul tema (pro-vita vs pro-diritti) utilizzandolo anche al fine di attaccare la “disinformazione” dei legacy media. Questa issue nelle sue varie declinazioni (diritto all’aborto, famiglie omogenitoriali, adozioni, ecc.) si è inoltre distinta per l’elevato successo ottenuto fra gli utenti di Facebook in termini di engagement, confermando come l’agenda di queste piattaforme, rispetto a quella dei legacy media, sia più spesso caratterizzata da social issues (Russel Neuman et al. 2014). Obiettivo della ricerca è mettere a confronto due temi che hanno interessato in maniera materiale e diretta le tasche degli italiani con due temi più di nicchia - meno impattanti sul vissuto quotidiano della maggior parte dei cittadini e fortemente polarizzanti - nelle discussioni che si sono sviluppate all’interno di Facebook durante la campagna elettorale 2022. I temi al centro della ricerca sono: energia/caro bollette, contrasto alla povertà/reddito di cittadinanza e aborto/famiglia, cambiamento climatico. Dal momento che i social media possono essere ormai considerati come un eco-ambiente che contribuisce al pari dei legacy media a influenzare il dibattito pubblico, è necessario comprendere come si sia sviluppato il dibattito all’interno della piattaforma in relazione a questi quattro temi, confrontando come cambiano le dinamiche di influenza, gli attori che assumono un ruolo da protagonista e i frame interpretativi che vengono diffusi (Entman 2010; Binotto, Nobile, Rega 2020). Le ipotesi che muovono il progetto di ricerca sono le seguenti: H1: L’agenda di Facebook sulle obtrusive issues è dettata dalle élite tradizionali (legacy media e attori politici), mentre quella sulle issues più coinvolgenti in termini ideali e fortemente controverse è stata influenzata da attori almeno in parte diversi, quali influencer, celebrity, gruppi di cittadini attivi, bloggers, ecc. H2a: Nel caso delle obtrusive issues, centrali nel dibattito pubblico durante la campagna elettorale 2022 e trasversali nelle agende dei diversi attori in gioco, è emersa una convergenza nei frames circolati all’interno della piattaforma. H2b: Nel caso dei temi più coinvolgenti in termini ideali e fortemente controversi, si ipotizza una maggiore diversificazione dei frames utilizzati in considerazione del fatto che si tratta di questioni altamente polarizzanti, la cui diffusione è favorita dalle affordances stesse della piattaforma. La ricerca ha analizzato i post pubblicati sulle pagine e sui gruppi Facebook dal 22 agosto al 25 settembre 2022. Tramite CrowdTangle, sono stati raccolti in totale sui quattro temi in analisi 84.661 post. Nello specifico, sul tema energia/caro bollette 49.790 post pubblicati da 12.054 utenti unici che hanno ottenuto in media 183 total interactions; sul tema contrasto alla povertà/reddito di cittadinanza 30.902 post pubblicati da 8.737 utenti unici che hanno ottenuto in media 420 total interactions; sul tema aborto/famiglia 9.808 post pubblicati da 4.319 utenti unici che hanno ottenuto in media 1.669 total interaction; e sul tema cambiamento climatico 18.678 post pubblicati da 8.753 utenti unici che hanno ottenuto in media 156 total interactions. L’intero materiale raccolto è stato analizzato tramite i tool QDA Miner e WordStat.

Al di là del fatto che la campagna 2022 sia stata accompagnata da giudizi poco lusinghieri da parte dei cittadini, in questo studio ci concentriamo sul dibattito che si è sviluppato tra gli utenti di Twitter in riferimento ai principali leader politici, Giorgia Meloni, Giuseppe Conte, Matteo Salvini, Carlo Calenda ed Enrico Letta. L’obiettivo della ricerca è di mostrare come l’uso dell’inciviltà cambi a seconda dei soggetti ai quali si associa e degli obiettivi che si prefigge, che possono spaziare dall’attacco frontale nei confronti del soggetto menzionato e/o della sua coalizione, a forme di attacco generalizzato contro la classe politica e/o i giornalisti, sino all’uso dell’inciviltà per difendere il leader di riferimento. In relazione ai diversi casi variano, ovviamente, i tipi di inciviltà adottati. La letteratura evidenzia, ad esempio, che le donne sono più spesso bersaglio dell’inciviltà rispetto agli uomini (Southern and Harmer, 2019) e ciò accade anche nell’ambito della politica e del giornalismo, dove sono soprattutto candidate e reporters di sesso femminile ad essere oggetto di attacchi aggressivi e incivili (Chen et al. 2018; Harmer and Southern, 2021; Post and Kepplinger 2019). Un’altra tendenza emersa dalla ricerca riguarda i candidati in testa nei sondaggi (front runners) che sono più suscettibili di essere attaccati in maniera più violenta a causa della loro posizione di forza percepita nella competizione elettorale: attaccare il candidato in testa può essere una mossa strategica per minare il loro sostegno ed erodere il loro vantaggio nei sondaggi (Auter and Fine 2016; Klinger, 2022). Sulla base di tali evidenze ipotizziamo che l’inciviltà da parte dei cittadini che hanno twittato durante la campagna elettorale si sia manifestata in maniera più netta nei confronti delle donne e contro i candidati front-runners. Con l’obiettivo di comprendere quale sia stato l’andamento delle espressioni di inciviltà nel corso delle quattro settimane di campagna e come si siano sviluppate le diverse forme di inciviltà a seconda del leader menzionato nel tweet, abbiamo scaricato tutti i tweet contenenti almeno un riferimento ai cinque candidati (mention, hashtag o cognome) postati durante le quattro settimane precedenti il voto (1.868.394 tweet complessivi). Il ricorso a un algoritmo per individuare i tweet contenenti almeno una forma di inciviltà ha portato alla definizione di un corpus (278.352 tweet) dal quale è stato estratto un campione rappresentativo su cui è stata effettuata un’analisi del contenuto manuale. Tale analisi ha esaminato l’uso dell’inciviltà in relazione a tre variabili, l’obiettivo, il target e il tipo di inciviltà adottata. I primi risultati mostrano che l’inciviltà dei cittadini si è manifestata in maniera più netta nei confronti delle donne e si è concentrata prevalentemente contro i candidati front-runners. Inoltre, se le forme di name-calling sono emerse come il tipo di inciviltà più presente e trasversalmente diffuso in associazione a tutti i leader, differenze significative si sono riscontrate in relazione ad altri tipi di inciviltà. In particolare si è visto che in relazione a leader di forze politiche populiste e antisistema (es. Giuseppe Conte), che usano sistematicamente l’inciviltà per attaccare i giornalisti percepiti come faziosi e allineati alle élite politiche ed economiche (Wettstein et al. 2018), ha prevalso un uso dell’inciviltà di tipo informativo (disinformazione). Differente è il caso di Giorgia Meloni che, essendo a capo di un partito di destra radicale (Bobba & McDonnell, 2016) caratterizzato da radici salde nel post-fascismo, nazionalismo e sovranismo (Ventura 2022), è stata più associata all’uso dell’inciviltà come forma di demonizzazione, vale a dire, a modalità di attacco nelle quali si attribuiscono alla leader caratteristiche negative estreme o immorali per associarla a figure/simboli relativi all’immaginario dei regimi totalitari, evidenziando così la sua mancanza di rispetto per i diritti individuali e delle minoranze. In generale, la ricerca ha anche confermato che le espressioni di inciviltà nei confronti dei leader di altri partiti, trattati come nemici, attivano forme di hashtag activism, in cui gli users/hashtag publics intervengono nel dibattito secondo logiche in-group vs out-group.

The latest electoral campaign that took place in Italy during the summer ‘22 was widely regarded as one of the less interesting in recent years. Several factors contributed to this perception. Firstly, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis captured the attention of the public and media, overshadowing the political campaign. With Giorgia Meloni's victory widely anticipated, the election's outcome appeared quite predictable, which further diminished the enthusiasm surrounding the campaign. This combination of factors ultimately resulted in a lackluster and uneventful electoral campaign, leaving many observers feeling unengaged and disinterested. For these reasons, the leaders of various political parties found it challenging to assert their own agenda and gain visibility in the public sphere. Indeed, upon analysing the newspaper articles from those days, it becomes evident that a "shock proposal" was noticeably absent, which could have directed the narrative and shaped the campaign for one or more political parties, as had happened in the past (Mancini, 2001; Mancini and Marini, 2006; Roncarolo, 2014; Bentivegna, Boccia Artieri, 2019). Our study aims to analyze the extent to which the leaders' proposals were actually covered by the press, and more broadly, how successful they were in shaping the public discourse agenda. In particular, the study focuses on the topic of "basic income", which has been the pillar topic of Giuseppe Conte and of the M5S and which, according to our data, is the only policy issue outside of the energy crisis that emerged in the public agenda during the electoral campaign. It is indeed a policy issue that has already been proposed during the 2018 electoral campaign, but it raised attention as it possesses a decisive characteristic in today's media landscape: the ability to divide and create conflict. Since its proposal, the basic income has divided both the political class and citizens alike. The hypothesis from which this study stems is that, despite the various policy proposals raised by different leaders, the issue of basic income has taken center stage in the debate precisely due to its controversial nature. To test the research hypothesis, a Topic Modeling Analysis was first conducted using QDA Miner, a program for qualitative text analysis, along with its quantitative component WordStat. This analysis focused on all Facebook posts and tweets published between August 29 and September 25, 2022, by the major Italian political leaders (Meloni, Salvini, Berlusconi, Letta, Conte, Calenda, Renzi) to identify the main themes discussed during the electoral campaign. These findings were then cross-referenced with the results of a similar analysis conducted on articles published during the same period by leading online and print newspapers. The analysis of tweets and Facebook posts revealed that almost all the leaders sought to bring policy proposals aimed at addressing citizens' difficulties to the forefront of the public agenda. However, when comparing the social media data with the journalistic coverage, it became apparent that basic income, unlike other policy issues, was able to attract media attention precisely due to its controversial nature. The results suggest that the topic of basic income gained interest primarily due to the efforts of some opponents of the Five Star Movement (M5S), particularly Renzi and Calenda. Their strong criticism of the measure made basic income a highly newsworthy topic, especially in the final weeks of the campaign, effectively providing valuable assistance to the M5S campaign. The high level of controversy surrounding basic income placed it at the center of journalistic debate, confirming that the shaping of the public agenda is considered a conflictual dynamic in which different social and political actors compete with each other. References Bentivegna, S. & Boccia Artieri, G. (2019). Niente di nuovo sul fronte mediale. Agenda pubblica e campagna elettorale. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Mancini P (2001) La posta in gioco. Temi, personaggi e satira nella campagna elettorale 2001. Roma: Carocci. Mancini, P. & Marini, R. (2006) Agenda setting, personalizzazione e clima di opinione nella campagna 2004-2006. In Comunicazione politica, vol. 7, n.2., pp. 259-286. Roncarolo, F. (2014) Adesso basta! La posta in gioco delle elezioni 2013 fra ciclo elettorale e protesta antipartitica. In Comunicazione Politica n.1, pp. 11-28.

With the intermingling of politics and digital marketing, political communication requires a more mindful and accurate effort than before. During Donald Trump's election campaign, we have witnessed the first instance of aggressive online and offline communication, in particular with the use of memes and the demonising and ridiculing of his opponent Hilary Clinton. The same happened in Italy with the rise of the "Movimento 5 Stelle" and , more recently, of Giorgia Meloni. Attention must be drawn, however, to the fact that even organisations engaged in social or environmental issues, like Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Future, use aggressive communication. Their communicative approach is similar to that of great advocates for social justice, who argued that political anger played a key role in the outcome of their struggle; (Peters, 2012) grassroots social anger has usually been the electoral basin of the left, but this has changed with the arrival of populist parties. Aggressive political communication seems to be particularly effective, especially in social media communication, considering the fact that political leaders move in a permanent campaign condition (Ceccobelli 2018). The upcoming American presidential election on 5 November 2024, the British general election and the European parliamentary elections in June 2024, force one to reflect on the weight and thus the relevance of aggressive political communication. This is accompanied by a rapidly growing rise of artificial intelligence and tools that implement it and that may soon be commonly used in political campaigns. For instance, the very recent pictures of Donald Trump being arrested are a clear example of how 'deepfakes', combined with incessant negative campaigning, can easily render the rules of the peri-election period obsolete. (Vaccari & Chadwick, 2020). The aim of this paper is to understand whether and to what extent the choice of using a high level of aggression in political communication is effective. To do this, I made use of textual sentiment analysis tools such as 'Roberta' and 'FEEL-IT' and the facial recognition tool associated with emotion recognition 'Amazon Rekognition'. This choice has the dual value of demonstrating the potential of the tools in the analysis phase, but also of investigating the results they produce. The case studies I selected are those of British PM Rishi Sunak, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and activist leader Greta Thunberg. The choice to compare the position and role of the Italian and British premiers is motivated by two reasons. Firstly, the political stances and institutional roles of both premiers bear similarities that enable a fruitful comparative analysis. Secondly, the research was further enriched by a period of time spent in London with the aim of being present during the peri-electoral period of the local elections. During this period of research on the field, I attended the Prime Minister's question time live, with the aim of also being able to analyse the communication of the British leader in person, integrating computational analysis and the results of qualitative analysis. The addition of the analysis of the founder of the global environmental movement 'Fridays for future' is intended to add a further element of complexity, allowing me both to apply this research method to a leader who is not part of the institutions, and to analyse any communicative differences from the other two government leaders. The addition of the latter is also aimed at investigating the possibility that aggressive political communication, often commonly associated with the right wing of the political spectrum, is actually more effective for those who have ethically relevant issues, such as the fight against climate change and civil rights, as the cornerstone of their proposal in the political arena. The focus of this study is an analysis of social media activity within the context of political leadership. Instagram, rather than the more ubiquitous Twitter platform, was selected for scrutiny due to its greater reach among the general population (We Are Social, 2023). Specifically, the investigation encompasses a one-month period preceding and following the appointment of two party leaders. The present study aims to investigate the perception of aggression in political communication on Instagram through a mixed-method approach. The study analyses textual and visual content of posts published by political leaders on Instagram, focusing on aggressive expressions, including both facial expressions and linguistic features. Moreover, the study cross-references texts perceived as aggressive with images perceived as positive to investigate the relative weight of the two dimensions of perception. To add further validity and replicability, an online experiment was conducted, including demographic and political questions as control variables. Findings show that aggressive political communication on Instagram by conservative leaders seems to be linked with a decrease in popularity, while an environmentalist leader's aggressive communication style seems to capitalise on increased popularity and engagement. The study also identifies characteristic keywords associated with each emotion, which were used in both the focus group and online experiment. Furthermore, this analysis highlights the importance of maintaining coherence between the message conveyed and its perception, both on social media and in live contexts.

La campagna elettorale negativa può essere definita come la strategia adottata da partiti o candidati che li porta a prendere di mira gli avversari, criticandoli, al fine di ottenere voti. Si differenzia delle campagne elettorali positive, in cui i partiti o i candidati si concentrano sulle proprie qualità e abilità, per essere visti come più attraenti di altri (Lau e Rovner 2009). Negli ultimi decenni, la letteratura sulle campagne negative ha identificato una serie di fattori che portano partiti o candidati politici a diventare negativi nelle sue campagne. Tuttavia, la letteratura esistente non ha esplorato completamente la differenza rilevante tra la negatività basata su temi politici sostantivi (issue-focused negativity, focalizzata sulla posizione dell'avversario su una questione specifica) e la negatività basata qualità generali (valence-focused negativity, basata sui loro tratti generali negativi), poiché si concentra quasi sempre su un solo tipo di negatività, o su entrambi senza distinguerli. In questo articolo, utilizzando un innovativo set di dati su circa 9500 messaggi negativi pubblicati sui giornali durante 37 campagne elettorali di primo ordine in dieci democrazie europee (Repubblica Ceca, Danimarca, Germania, Ungheria, Paesi Bassi, Portogallo, Polonia, Spagna, Svezia, Regno Unito), miriamo a colmare questa lacuna facendo luce sulla frequenza relativa di questi due tipi di negatività nelle campagne, nonché valutando in che misura la loro frequenza è influenzata da diverse variabili legate alle elezioni, ai partiti e alle campagne stesse. I risultati suggeriscono che la distanza ideologica tra il mittente e il bersaglio, il momento della campagna e la natura del sistema dei partiti sono fattori rilevanti. Da un lato, più i partiti mittente e bersaglio sono distanti dal punto di vista ideologico, meno è probabile che l'osservazione negativa si concentri su valutazioni di onestà, integrità o competenza invece che su questioni politiche sostanziali. Dall'altro, negli ultimi giorni di campagna, è più probabile che le affermazioni negative si occupino di (assenza di) qualità piuttosto che di argomenti sostanziali. Infine, la negatività basata su qualità politiche generiche è più probabile nei sistemi partitici meno frammentati. In breve, questi risultati fanno luce e ci consentono di comprendere in modo sistematico gli incentivi e i contesti in cui i partiti decidono di rendere le sue campagne elettorali veramente brutte.

Following an unexpected government crisis that escalated in July, the 2022 Italian general election was held right after summer time, something never happened so far in the country. It has hence been a very unusual and (ever more) extraordinary election campaign under different aspects and perspectives. Not being expected mainly by political parties themselves, this snap election has found both party leaders and party candidates all but fully prepared to conduct this election campaign at best, pushing all of them to take very sudden and critical decisions in a very short amount of time. This for instance applied to i) what electoral alliances to create, ii) who to include in electoral lists as candidates, or iii) how to run the campaign in terms of its concrete communicative strategy in a (likely) cross-media and cross-platform perspective. Yet, an unexpected election campaign is one in which parties had no time to plan a full and fruitful fundraising strategy, pushing therefore political leaders, their own parties and single candidates as well to dedicate most of their communicative production to those media environments that made them in a real time ability to deliver their political messages, such as social media. But what social media? Have candidates campaigned only on Facebook and Twitter, i.e. the platforms that have previously characterized the core of social media communication or have they populated new platforms that had no role in the 2018 Italian general election, such as Instagram and TikTok? Were there any strong differences in terms of social media adoption and use based on specific platform affordances? Were social media accounts of party candidates able to produce relevant and vast amount of followers, or this can only be applied to political leaders? Moreover, since the Italian electoral law include both a first-past-the-post and a proportional component, are candidates associated to the former the ones investing more time and energies on social media, as well attracting a much more significant amount of followers? And what about incumbent vs candidates who did not hold any position within the national Parliament? Or what about gender and age? Finally, did candidates of a specific party resemble the communicative style of their own party leader on social media? Starting from these research interrogatives within the theoretical and analytical framework of digital campaigning in the context of platform society, this paper aims at achieving a first mapping of the current Italian social media environment applied to the sphere of politics, in particular after the rapid spread and diffusion of new platforms with their specific affordances and cultural codes. It will do so combining both top-down and bottom-up variables in the field of political communication with socio-political and socio-technical variables, including also analyses and reflections on whether and how some platform peculiarities incentive or disincentive specific groups of candidates in a stronger adoption and use of different social media. While there is already a substantial body of scientific literature on social media and electoral campaigns in the context of Italy, there is a lack of comprehensive research specifically focused on TikTok, a relatively new and recent digital platform. As a result, the paper in question will primarily concentrate on TikTok to determine the extent to which the 2022 Italian elections can be considered the first elections where TikTok had a notable impact. The dataset includes a large sample of candidates running in the Italian Parliamentary elections held in September 2022 (N=2964). For proportional seats, it includes all candidates for parties polling over 2% according to the latest official polls available (roughly 2 weeks before the election). For majoritarian seats, it includes all candidates for coalitions or parties polling over 2% according to the latest official polls available (same as above). Focusing on TikTok and exploring whether the 2022 elections can be considered the first TikTok elections in Italy reveals that there was a limited level of knowledge and utilization of TikTok among Italian candidates. Preliminary data indicate that only a small percentage of candidates had their own TikTok accounts (11.3% of the total), in contrast to the higher adoption rates of platforms such as Facebook (63.5% of the total), Instagram (62.5% of the total), and Twitter (49.4% of the total). The data also demonstrate that TikTok had the lowest number of followers (2.1 million) among the four platforms mentioned, with Twitter (22.4 million), Instagram (13.9 million), and Facebook (43.5 million) having higher follower counts. Among the various political parties, the "Movimento Cinque Stelle" has the highest percentage of candidates with TikTok accounts (21.2%), followed by the "Lega per Salvini Premier" (14.5%), while the "Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra" has the lowest percentage (5.4%). However, the most significant differences among the parties are observed in the adoption of other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Furthermore, when analyzing TikTok usage in relation to variables such as gender, constituency type (majoritarian or proportional seats), or age groups (over and under 40), some significant differences emerge. However, the small percentage variance observed prevents us from identifying the existence of a clear trend in absolute values. This suggests that the relationship between TikTok and Italian politics may still be in its early stage, with similar adoption rates among candidates.

More than 90% of Americans identify incivility as a problem (“Civility in America,” 2019), and over 70% want politicians to behave more civilly (Bonn, 2020). Such distaste for candidate incivility – i.e., candidates’ disrespectful conduct against political opponents – is linked to the fact that this rhetorical device is broadly conceived as norm-violating conduct, and people tend to respond negatively to norm violations (Maisel, 2012). However, insults, displays of anger, and sarcastic remarks are still strategically employed by candidates for electoral gains (Herbst, 2010). This article addresses the conundrum whereby incivility is seemingly disliked and criticized yet increasingly used and steadily getting “normalized.” Starting from the definition of incivility as a perceived norm violation and the assumption that norms are individual and collective constructs, we argue that what matters the most is what shapes individuals’ perceptions and evaluations of incivility – which we test in this paper. Scholars have already pointed out that assessing the consequences of political incivility through objective criteria is problematic (Liang & Zhang, 2021). As the product of individual and collective experiences, norms intrinsically have a subjective dimension (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). As such, expecting that incivility exists “in the eye of the beholder” seems fundamental (Herbst, 2010). Failing to do so likely leads to a generalized mismatch between the offer and demand of political incivility – or, in other terms, a mismatch between what politicians say and how it is experienced. Hence, we focus on how incivility unfolds through two psychological mechanisms. On the one hand, we test how individuals receive, organize, and interpret political incivility, i.e., their perceptions. On the other, we assess how people make judgments or form opinions about political incivility, i.e., their evaluations. To do so, we build upon normative theories and apply them to incivility research. We posit that perceptions and evaluations of incivility, because seen as a norm-violation, are contingent on (i) individual dispositions, which generate different personal norms for different individuals, and (ii) situational constraints, which produce different social norms depending on the situation in which incivility is expressed. Understanding the interplay between individual dispositions and situational constraints will allow scholars to unpack more precisely under what circumstances incivility is (un)effective as an electoral strategy. Against this backdrop, we identify the individual dispositions (personality traits and political attitudes) and situational constraints (candidate, attack, and setting characteristics) relevant to civility norms and test how they shape people’s perceptions and evaluations of incivility. By doing so, we aim to answer the following research question: (RQ) To what extent do individual dispositions and situational constraints shape perceptions and evaluations of candidate incivility? We answer this research question through a conjoint experiment on samples of U.S. and Italian citizens. We plan on recruiting N = 3500 respondents in each country in July 2023. Respondents to an online survey will be presented with the profiles of fictitious candidates attacking a political opponent in an uncivil manner and asked about their perceptions and evaluation of each attack. These baseline profiles are manipulated on several attributes corresponding to the situational constraints of incivility. Simultaneously and randomly manipulating these attributes, we can assess their causal effect independently. Additionally, we will ask respondents about their personality and political attitudes. This will allow us to test individual-level differences in the perceptions and evaluation of political incivility. By unpacking the psychological mechanisms that underlie perceptions and evaluations of incivility, we aim to help future studies to shed light on why incivility is a (un)effective electoral strategy.

The issue of climate change has been becoming increasingly relevant in contemporary societies. Nevertheless, for a long time, the issue has been considered low-salient in the Italian debate, and Italian social and political sciences devoted scant attention to it. Therefore, little is still known about attitudes toward climate change among the Italian public. A great amount of empirical research from various contexts suggests that while most people tend to be concerned about climate change and consider it an important problem, there is only a moderate willingness to sacrifice for mitigating climate change. This contribution aims thus at shedding light on Italian public opinion regarding the multiple dimensions of climate change (salience, concern, risk perception, and willingness to sacrifice). Starting from different theoretical perspectives and dialoguing with the extant empirical research, the work also intends to analyze to what extent socio-economic characteristics (e.g., gender, age-cohort, education, economic status) and political orientation allow explaining climate change attitudes and to explore whether the patterns vary depending on the multiple dimensions of climate change attitudes. In particular, we aim to test whether climate change attitudes reflect social and political divides. To answer the research questions, we will provide first insights on online survey data collected within the ResPOnsE COVID-19 project in 2022 and 2023. To provide empirical evidence on the longitudinal variation of climate change and environmental attitudes in Italy, we will also employ data coming from international survey programs (e.g., Eurobarometer, International Social Survey Programme). Finally, we will discuss the implication of the results in light of the extant literature and detect possible lines of research that could be further explored. This work is part of a broader project aimed at analyzing the climate change issues in Italian public opinion, media, and parties, by especially focusing on the political sphere.

Although the consequences of global warming are increasingly evident in our country, climate change is considered a priority issue by only a relatively small percentage of voters, with a greater imbalance to the left than to the right. In a series of correlational and experimental studies, we have examined knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about climate change. We have also examined how communication about environmental policy can help strengthen or weaken concern and commitment to climate change. Here, we present the results of two studies. In the first study, we analysed data from the ITANES 2022 survey, which involved a representative sample of Italian voters (N = 1,522) from 5 September to 24 September, 2022. As part of a broader questionnaire, we measured belief in climate change, its attribution to natural or human causes, and concern about its consequences. The resulting data show that while awareness of the existence of climate change is generally high among voters, there are significant differences in more specific assessments depending on political orientation, such as the question of the anthropogenic origin of climate change and the timeframe of its consequences. In the second part of this study, we investigated whether the way energy policies related to climate change are framed can influence voters' judgements about these policies, depending on their beliefs about the phenomenon and, more importantly, on their different political orientations. We presented messages to different groups of participants describing the impact of energy policies to address climate change. The focus was either on the environment (e.g., "If we increase renewable energy production, we will improve our climate and have more comfortable temperatures") or on the economy (e.g., "If we increase renewable energy production, we will improve our economic conditions and have lower bills"). The data collected showed that support for these policies varies according to the political orientation of the participants, with a general tendency towards greater support from the left than from the right, but with two different trends depending on how these policies are presented. While the imbalance between the left and the right is evident when environmental consequences are emphasised, the gap tends to narrow when the focus is on economic consequences. In general, the differences between voters narrow when the economic dimension is emphasised and, in some cases they even disappear. In the second study, conducted on a non-representative sample (N = 410) in the post-election period (November-December 2022), the experimental design of the first study was partially replicated, manipulating the framing in the same way and introducing an additional manipulation related to the source of the message (in different experimental conditions: Environmentalists, Industrialists, or Scientists). In line with the previous study, agreement with the appeal varied according to the framing (environmental vs. economic) and political self-placement: while only left-leaning participants showed high levels of support for the proposed policy in the environmental framing, differences became smaller in the economic framing. No effects of the message source emerged. Based on the results of the two studies, the discussion analyses the opportunities and potential risks of using different arguments to increase support for climate change policies, focusing on the environmental or the economic dimension depending on the target group.

Today, climate change is widely perceived as a pressing crisis. Regardless of the electoral landscape, many individuals express their inclination to vote for a political party that prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability in its agenda. Yet, it is puzzling to see such a propensity not translating more often into pro-environmental choices at the ballot box. While empirical evidence demonstrates that implementing policies aligned with pro-environmental goals can coexist with economic growth, such policies could be perceived by the electorate as potential obstacles to economic progress. Thus, voters prioritizing the economy over the environment might find themselves confronted with the dilemma of whether to (still) support pro-environmental parties. How does a potential trade-off between environmental concern and economic growth impact green voting propensity? Additionally, voters may face a similar dilemma when their finances are impacted by pro-environmental taxes or increased costs associated with adopting sustainable habits. Does the inclination to vote for a pro-environmental party remain strong even among those who are not willing to bear individual economic costs? This manuscript addresses these inquiries through a multivariate statistical analysis based on original survey data, representative of the Italian population and collected through the "Sustainability and food (in)security" project (2021) conducted by the Department of Economics, Society, Politics at Urbino University Carlo Bo. Given the objective of this contribution, the Italian case emerges as a particularly relevant context, due to its stagnant economy, widespread feelings of political underrepresentation, increasing abstention rates, poor historical performance of pro-environmental parties, and a comparatively high latency of environmental issues in public debate. In light of the presented dilemma, the study highlights differences between socio-demographic characteristics, specific concerns regarding the environment and food safety, self-declared ideological positions on the left-right axis, and voting patterns for specific parties. Therefore, this research identifies the profile of individuals willing (or unwilling) to vote for a pro-environmental party if willing (or unwilling) to prioritize the environment over economic costs, both at the individual and country levels.

The fight against climate change has brought at the centre of European political debates new controversial issues such as energy, industrial, tax and social policies required to address the green transition. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and ensuing growing concerns about energy security and skyrocketing energy prices, dramatically renovated the urgency of such debates. Against such background, this paper investigates the priorities of public opinion across EU countries around the ‘trilemma’ between fighting climate change, promoting economic growth and protecting household disposable income. Based on a survey experiment conducted in the framework of the SOLID project, we first look at publics’ preferences on different policy strategies to investigate whether citizens prefer to support the green transition away from fossil fuels or if instead short-term economic evaluations prevail. Secondly, we assess the emergence of ‘eco-social’ coalitions by investigating whether and how individual preferences along the trade-off between securing economic growth and energy autonomy, on one side, and fostering environmental sustainability, on the other, change when the governments introduce different kinds of social compensation policies to mitigate the negative effects of the green transition

Nella fase attuale di ipermediatizzazione della sfera pubblica, nel confronto politico acquista sempre maggior rilevanza lo scontro tra narrazioni politiche concorrenti, veicoli ideologici attraverso i quali partiti e gruppi offrono frames esplicativi dei principali fenomeni e problemi di policy (Entman, 1993). Dentro questo quadro, i partiti rappresentano allo stesso tempo attori rilevanti del sistema istituzionale e vettori di frame esplicativi dei principali fenomeni sociali, attraverso la costruzione di rappresentazioni simboliche funzionali sia alla riproduzione della loro identità ideologica sia alle loro ambizioni competitive. Tra i più impellenti fattori di stress per i sistemi democratici contemporanei, e tra i principali argomenti che contribuiscono a polarizzare lo scontro politico tra partiti, vi è oggi senza dubbio la crisi climatica con le sue conseguenze sociali (Hoffman, 2011). Nel contesto europeo e italiano le strategie della transizione ecologica ed energetica sono divenute centrali nell’agenda istituzionale e politica grazie all’approvazione del Green Deal europeo e le mobilitazioni di numerosi movimenti e gruppi di interesse sensibili al tema. In un contesto già affollato e articolato di framing e di proposte di policy molteplici, la guerra in Ucraina e le sue implicazioni energetiche hanno contribuito a rafforzare la rilevanza della sicurezza energetica nelle strategie della transizione rafforzando tendenze politiche opposte: da una parte la richiesta di una transizione energetica, basata sulla decarbonizzazione, più ambiziosa e rapida e, dall’altra parte, una transizione energetica più lenta e attenta alla sicurezza energetica. La rappresentazione della transizione energetica da parte dei partiti politici costituisce l’oggetto di una competizione simbolica basata sulla definizione delle cause del cambiamento climatico, dei costi e degli attori della transizione, delle soluzioni principali da adottare, del ruolo della scienza e delle implicazioni geopolitiche spesso influenzata dalle collocazione dei soggetti partitici rispetto alle fratture classiche dei sistemi politici (destra/sinistra; nazionalismo/cosmopolitismo) (Lewis et al. 2019). Il contributo analizza il frame della crisi climatica e della transizione energetica proposto dai partiti italiani attraverso lo studio dei programmi e di altre fonti primarie perseguendo due obiettivi. Un primo obiettivo perseguito è quello di definire l’incidenza della variabile ideologica destra/sinistra nei frames della transizione per definire come l’issue della crisi climatica si articola e si integra alle fratture classiche. Un secondo obiettivo è quello di ricostruire l’incidenza di uno shock esogeno come la guerra in Ucraina, dalle forti implicazioni energetiche, sui frame della transizione e sulla rilevanza stessa della issue nel sistema politico. Il contributo analizza qualitativamente i programmi dei partiti politici italiani delle elezioni 2018 (nazionali) e 2019 (europee) precedenti alla guerra in Ucraina e al Green Deal e alle elezioni del 2022 (nazionali) successive all’inizio del conflitto in Ucraina e all’approvazione del Green Deal. Grazie alla letteratura sul tema vengono ricostruiti alcuni frame discorsivi ricorrenti per variabile ideologica; successivamente vengono analizzati qualitativamente i testi dei programmi dei partiti attraverso l’individuazione degli elementi costitutivi di un frame (causa, vittime, colpevoli e soluzioni di un problema) e, infine, vengono individuati i tipi di frame presenti nel contesto italiano. I risultati del lavoro permettono di individuare tre principali tipi di frame nel contesto partitico italiano che rappresentano la definizione da destra, da sinistra e dal centro della transizione energetica attraverso l’indicazione di responsabili, vittime, soluzioni e cause della crisi molto diverse. Inoltre, la guerra in Ucraina sembra aver aumentato la rilevanza complessiva della issue energetica rafforzando, soprattutto, il focus sugli aspetti legati alla sicurezza energetica in termini geopolitici (diversificazione maggiore del mix energetico, sfruttamento risorse nazionali) e di contrasto all’inflazione (incentivi pubblici al consumo) mettendo in discussione, in alcuni casi, gli stessi obiettivi della transizione energetica disegnata dal Green Deal. Bibliografia Entman R.M. (1993), “Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm”, Journal of Communication, 43, 4: 51-58. Hoffman, A. J. (2011). Talking past each other? Cultural framing of skeptical and convinced logics in the climate change debate. Organization & Environment, 24, 3-33. Lewis, Gregory B.; Palm, Risa; Feng, Bo (2018). Cross-national variation in determinants of climate change concern. Environmental Politics, (), 1–29. doi:10.1080/09644016.2018.1512261

The paper will focus on collective action as one of the principal features or basic structures of the social realm in a peculiar site of collective action: production, distribution and use of energy. The energy question is fundamental in relation to the green transition. At the same time, the latter cannot be thought of exclusively as a top-down process, but must necessarily involve, or be the result of, widespread social practices organised towards common goals. While such practices may take the form of social movements that challenge governmental institutions, highlighting their lagging behind in the face of the climate imperative, we should not exclude from our analysis the forms of socio-ecologic self-organisation that may occur in contemporary societies. An inquiry of this sort implies a couple of challenges. On one hand, it is crucial to understand how complex and material energy systems can be managed without delegating to large, powerful and bureaucratic organisations. On the other hand, it is necessary to demonstrate whether collective action is done under the full control of consciousness or rather be seen as a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled (Latour, 2005). When it comes to the role of social agents in the energy transition, rather than participating as mere and passive energy consumers, members of a collective can assume several different roles within the energy system. Collective Action on the energy system is usually referred to as energy “communities” or “cooperatives”, but it could also take the form of purchasing groups or virtual communities. Some authors define them as any sustainable energy initiative led by no-profit organisations, not commercially driven or government-led (Walker and Devine-Wright, 2008, Hall et al., 2016). Some others stress the grassroots innovation nature of community energy, as driven by civil society activists and by social and/or environmental needs, rather than by rent-seeking (Seyfang et al., 2014). All these contributions underline the importance of civil society or, better, of members of different collectives and groups, and their role in reshaping energy systems towards environmental and social objectives. Our approach aims to understand how the local energy systems can be reorganised and re-conceptualised by engaging local communities and fostering a bottom-up model able to capture the benefits of distributed energy resources while increasing the overall socio-ecological well-being. In this vision, local energy systems not only ensure energy self-provision but also provide inclusion, proactivity, resilience and empowerment. In our perspective, collective action applied to the energy system can easily go beyond the conventional boundaries of the energy system, embracing many other fields of social reproduction and organisation. Collective action is coming back in some way as a fundamental topic of social sciences investigation to explain social phenomena such as social change or renovated forms of movements’ mobilisation (see e.g. Willer, 2009). Among contemporary approaches, the Resource Mobilization theory, the Political Opportunity Structure theory, and the Frame theory have been developed to increase the understanding of those manifestations of collective actions known as movements. However, collective action deserves a more extended outlook to understand its roots in social thought. Charles Tilly, who combines the first two approaches presented above, discusses four types of collective action coming from different sociological traditions: Marxian, Durkheimian (structuralist), Millian (utilitarian) and Weberian (Tilly, 1978). Building on Tilly’s approach and beyond the challenge of defining the boundaries of collective action and its distinction from individual decision-making, our interest is more on the dynamic evolution of collective action, whose disordered and tumultuous development may sometimes lead toward sudden and unpredictable changes and innovation, rather on an institutional and bureaucratic embodiment of these actions. In other words, this distinction can be useful for our purpose in that we can bind our collective agents as those grassroots movements, communities or cooperatives that take decisions democratically, privileging horizontal and bottom-up procedures of decision-making rather than a top-down model as corporate actors do instead. Through the theoretical framework presented, we will ask and deepen to what extent collective action would contribute to a radical energy transition and a systemic social change. A few empirical case studies of energy communities in the EU are compared and discussed, useful to understand the main dynamics, feedback relations or mental structures in which collective action is rooted. The case studies will reflect distinct organisational forms, spatial settings, or policy contexts. To evaluate their transformative potential, attention is paid to highlighting which form of social movements they represent and which mobilization dynamic they rely on, as well as the diverse and widespread effect they can produce in terms of societal impact. The research will conclude by proposing some leverage points able to enhance and boost collective action around energy and promote new forms of energy communalism.

I media sono un attore importante nella lotta al cambiamento climatico perché possono influenzare la salienza del tema e proporre frame diversi. Ciononostante, sono pochi gli studi su questo argomento che prendono in considerazione l’Italia (Biancalana e Ladini 2022). Allo stesso tempo, sappiamo che crisi percepite come più urgenti possono offuscare l’attenzione conferita alla lotta al cambiamento climatico. Nell’ultimo anno, la crisi in Ucraina e le sue conseguenze sul piano economico, soprattutto per quanto riguarda il prezzo delle fonti di energia, sono state molto presenti nel coverage mediale (per il caso della campagna elettorale 2022, si veda Bentivegna, Marchetti e Roncarolo 2023). Oltre a mettere in secondo piano l’emergenza climatica, la guerra e la crisi energetica possono legarsi a frame diversi per quanto riguarda la lotta al climate change. Se da una parte la guerra può essere vista come un’opportunità per la transizione ecologica e la lotta al cambiamento climatico, attraverso per esempio gli sforzi per la sostituzione delle fonti fossili con quelle rinnovabili, dall’altra può configurarsi come un ostacolo e una scusa per non agire. L’obiettivo del paper è analizzare il coverage del Corriere della sera sui temi ambientali dal 24 febbraio 2022 al 24 febbraio 2023. Sono stati raccolti 1.166 articoli che sono stati codificati attraverso un codebook volto a sondare il modo in cui si è parlato di ambiente, quanto e come si è parlato di cambiamento climatico, quali attori sono i protagonisti del coverage, quali frame vengono utilizzati per parlare della crisi energetica.

Volodymyr Zelensky: dalle serie Tv alla Presidenza alla guerra. Le metamorfosi di un celebrity politician Nell’aprile 2019, l’elezione presidenziale ucraina attirò per un momento l’attenzione occidentale. Il vincitore, Volodymyr Zelensky, era, infatti, un attore comico e produttore, divenuto presidente dopo aver interpretato in una serie Tv il ruolo di un professore di scuola eletto alla più alta carica dello Stato grazie a un video virale e impegnato a combattere la corruzione e gli oligarchi. Una favola populista messa in scena da un attore trasmutato nel suo personaggio. Un caso estremo di celebrity politcs. Ma Zelensky diventa un celebrity politician a livello globale solo qualche anno dopo, con l’invasione russa dell’Ucraina. A divenire virale questa volta fu il video-selfie girato la sera dopo l’invasione del 24 febbraio 2022, presso il palazzo presidenziale, insieme a membri del suo governo. Un video per dire agli ucraini e al mondo che lui e i suoi uomini erano rimasti ed erano pronti a combattere. Da allora, con un’offensiva comunicativa senza precedenti, per parlare ai suoi cittadini, ai governanti occidentali e non solo, alle opinioni pubbliche mondiali, su ogni piattaforma disponibile, soprattutto sui nuovi media, Zelensky è assurto allo status di celebrità globale. Tra la vittoria elettorale e l’invasione trascorrono due anni e mezzo, durante i quali Zelensky si trova ad affrontare, tra gli altri problemi, i rapporti con gli oligarchi – il cui potere in campagna elettorale si era impegnato a ridimensionare – e quelli con la Russia e la correlata guerra in Donbass. Anche in questo caso, il raggiungimento della pace aveva costituito una delle sue più importanti promesse. In quel periodo, il nuovo presidente misura la difficoltà di gestire il governo di un Paese in fase di consolidamento democratico e stretto tra Russia ed Europa, munito di ottime capacità comunicative, ma portatore di grande inesperienza. Obiettivo del paper è quello di evidenziare come il modo di Zelensky di sfruttare il ruolo di celebrity politician sia mutato nel tempo – pur sussistendo elementi di continuità – in corrispondenza delle sfide via via differenti che si è trovato ad affrontare. Come studio di caso, quello di Zelensly consente di cogliere momenti diversi del percorso del leader e rende, perciò, possibile trasformare un case-study in più case studies comparabili. Ciò è utile non solo in funzione dello studio della specifica leadership oggetto del paper, ma anche al fine di fornire un approfondimento sui diversi modi in cui la celebrity politics può rapportarsi all’azione del leader. La politica celebrità costituisce un fenomeno emerso dal processo di mediatizzazione, inserito all’interno di più generali processi di mutamento socioeconomico e tecnologico con un forte impatto sulla politica. Al tempo stesso, nella misura in cui i leader politici intraprendono un’azione di auto-mediatizzazione, la celebrity può essere vista come uno strumento utilizzato dal leader medesimo per raggiungere propri obiettivi. In particolare, si propone qui di distinguere tra un’auto-mediatizzazione che costruisce e sfrutta la celebrità al fine del consenso e una celebrità funzionale a obiettivi di policy. Naturalmente, la distinzione è analitica e le due situazioni possono sovrapporsi, innanzitutto in quanto lo stesso consenso può essere utilizzato per perseguire obiettivi di policy. Tuttavia, è a nostro avviso possibile sia distinguere leadership che hanno fatto ricorso alla celebrità in modo prevalente per l’uno o l’altro fine sia leadership che in momenti diversi hanno maggiormente privilegiato o l’obiettivo del consenso o quello di policy. Se, ad esempio, guardiamo alla presidenza americana, possiamo interpretare due celebrity politicians come Bill Clinton e Barack Obama, l’uno più orientato a utilizzare la celebrità per costruire una carriera politica e mantenere il consenso, l’altro a realizzare obiettivi di politica pubblica. Al contempo, nel caso di Obama, si può riscontrare in momenti o contesti diversi il perseguimento di entrambi gli obiettivi. Nel caso di Zelensky, si intende mostrare questa plasticità dell’uso della celebrità nelle diverse fasi della sua vita politica (anche in relazione al nesso celebrity-populismo, anch’esso mutevole) e fornire, dunque, nuovi spunti di riflessione sulla natura della celebrity politics. Keywords: Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine, Leadership, Celebrity Politics, Populism Riferimenti bibliografici Campus, D. (2020). Celebrity leadership. Quando i leader politici fanno le star. Comunicazione politica, 21(2), 185-203. Dorosh, L., Nocoń, J., & Zakaulova, Y. (2021). Social Networks in Electoral Campaigns: A Comparative Analysis of the Cases of Donald Trump (USA) and Volodymyr Zelensky (Ukraine). European Journal of Tranformation Studies, 9(2), 52-71. Genté, R. e S. Siohan. (2022). Volodymyr Zelensky - Dans la tête d'un héros, Paris: Robert Laffont Kaminskij, K. (2022). Joker as the servant of the people. Volodymyr Zelensky, Russophone entertainment and the performative turn in world politics. Russian Literature, 127, 151-175. Marshall, P. D. (2014). Celebrity and power. University of Minnesota Press. Plokhy, S. (2021). The Frontline. Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ryabinska, N. (2022). Politics as a joke: The case of Volodymyr Zelensky’s comedy show in Ukraine. Problems of Post-Communism, 69(2), 179-191. Roman, N., Beasley, B. A., e Parmelee, J. H. (2022). From fiction to reality: Presidential framing in the Ukrainian comedy Servant of the People. European Journal of Communication, 37(1), 48-62. Serafin, T. (2022). Ukraine’s President Zelensky Takes the Russia/Ukraine War Viral. Orbis, 66(4), 460-476. Street, J. (2004). Celebrity politicians: Popular culture and political representation. The British journal of politics and international relations, 6(4), 435-452. Wheeler, M. (2013). Celebrity politics. Polity.

Joe Biden's Hybrid Jeremiad Between the Campaign and the Presidency: a focus on "Unity" Prof. Enrico Graziani Dott. Roberth Pascal Sapienza Università di Roma Introduction In this paper we intend to conduct a comparative analysis of the employment of the “American jeremiad” hypotext (Ritter 1980; Bercovitch 2012; Austermühl 2014), between Joseph R. Biden’s presidential campaign and presidency, highlighting Biden’s interpretation of the term “unity”. Starting from the premise that presidential campaigns in the era of the rhetorical presidency (Tulis 2017) configure themselves as “a struggle for interpretive dominance [in which] candidates, journalists, and voters struggle to define the story of the election” (Smith 1995), we analyze how candidate Biden attempts to build an “interpretive coalition” (Smith and Smith 1994) through the topos of “unity”, investigating the role such topos assumes in his campaign announcement speech and his nomination acceptance speech. Furthermore, we investigate how these rhetorical strategies are employed in Biden’s presidential inauguration speech as well as his “Remarks on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation” delivered in Philadelphia on the First of September 2022, in order to conduct a comparative analysis, whose aim is to investigate Biden’s claims of being “a president who seeks not to divide but to unify” (Joe Biden, Inaugural Address). We argue that Joe Biden’s reinterpretation of the rhetorical form of the American Jeremiad is the result of a hybridization between the traditional form as theorized by Sacvan Bercovitch (2012) and Kurt W. Ritter (1980) and the hypotext identified by Frank Austermühl as the “Us vs. Them hypotext” (2014), which results in a notably distinct and more polarizing form than the traditional form. This hypothesis will be tested through an analysis of rhetorical strategies of polarization as theorized by Alan Fortuna, highlighting the role of the textual markers that define such strategies, namely simplification, exaggeration, and provocation (Fortuna 2019). Background and significance Recent studies on presidential rhetoric have shown that presidential candidates belonging to both major US parties have increasingly employed emotional appeals in their rhetoric (Jerit 2004) as well as an increasing use of “angry words in statements about opponents” along with presenting their opponents as “dangerous, unprincipled characters under the sway of threatening domestic and foreign influences” (Rhodes and Vayo 2019). These studies point to the need for rhetorical analysis which focuses on the polarizing effects of political rhetoric in the United States, especially as it pertains to affective polarization, which has been on the rise at least from the 1980s onwards (Iyengar et al. 2019). Research methods and design Given the deep historical roots of the American jeremiad hypotext and its ties to American Civil Religion (Cherry 1998) and American Exceptionalism (Heinke 2014) we intend to apply the Discourse-Historical approach (Wodak 2001; Reisigl 2017) in order to account for the complexity of the Hypertextual relationships displayed in the speeches we intend to analyze. Consequently, our analysis will take into account three levels of critique: a)Immanent critique, aimed at “discovering inconsistencies, (self-)contradictions, paradoxes and dilemmas in the text internal [...] structures”; b)Socio-diagnostic critique which regards “the demystifying exposure of the – manifest or latent – possibly persuasive or ‘manipulative’ character of discursive practices”; c)Prognostic critique, which aims to contribute to “the transformation and improvement of communication” (Wodak 2001).Following Wodak’s suggestion, in order to “minimize the risk of being biased” we will employ the principle of triangulation, accounting for four distinct levels of context: 1)the immediate internal co-text; 2) the intertextual and interdiscursive relationships between texts, genres and discourses; 3)the extralinguistic variables which constitute the “context of situation”; 4)the broader socio-political and historical context. The analysis shall proceed from the broader context toward the specific textual markers. First, we will establish the main features of American jeremiad hypotext, and explain how and why it is utilized by presidential candidates and presidents alike. Second, we will provide a description of the institutional frames of the campaign and the presidency, along with their specific constraints. Third, we will delineate the main characteristics of the specific genres to which the chosen speeches belong to, focusing on hypertextual relationships. Fourth, we will examine the internal co-text and the compatibility of its textual markers not only with the American jeremiad hypotext, but also with the “Us-vs.-Them” hypotext as theorized by Austermühl. Finally, our analysis will integrate Reisigl’s list of discursive strategies, namely nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, mitigation/intensification (Reisigl 2017) with the strategy of rhetorical polarization as theorized by Fortuna (2019) in order to assess whether the hypothesized “hybridization” of the American jeremiad does in fact accommodate the use of such strategies.

Negli anni della pandemia Covid 19, le politiche di contenimento e di vaccinazione di massa hanno prodotto conseguenze significative sugli atteggiamenti dei cittadini. Questi ultimi hanno avuto reazioni di segno diverso. Vi sono state infatti vistose risposte negative ad una presunta compressione dei diritti individuali. Ma, anche se forse meno visibile, si è registrato anche un apprezzamento per le decisioni assunte dai governi in materia sanitaria, e più in generale una crescente domanda di intervento pubblico. Le ricerche disponibili sulle conseguenze politiche della pandemia – e delle emergenze in generale – sono perlopiù orientate a chiarire quali effetti si producano a livello nazionale in termini di popolarità dei governi, fiducia nelle istituzioni e apprezzamento della democrazia. Tuttavia, anche le istituzioni locali sono state coinvolte nelle politiche di contrasto alla pandemia. Tenendo conto di questo aspetto, il presente paper mira a rilevare le (possibili) conseguenze politiche della pandemia a livello locale. A questo scopo, utilizziamo i dati di un sondaggio (N=2000) rappresentativo della popolazione sarda per esaminare la popolarità dei sindaci dei comuni isolani alla luce del ruolo svolto dai comuni durante l’emergenza sanitaria. Uno dei fattori dei fattori che sarà maggiormente valorizzato è la comunicazione istituzionale utilizzata dai comuni e l’apprezzamento nei suoi confronti manifestato dai cittadini.

According to the inclusion-moderation thesis, populist actors should become more moderate when they govern. Moderation comes as they must find a compromise to participate in coalitions. Subsequently, populist parties that got to power should be more moderate than those in opposition. Previous literature highlighted that this change can be intercepted at the narrative level. We test this hypothesis using the press releases of Fratelli di Italia in the years 2022/2023, covering the pre-electoral campaign, the electoral campaign and the establishment as the leading party in the government. Through procedures typical of natural language processing, we investigate how topics have changed in the party narrative, their salience and polarity. We expect that topics become more differentiated and less polarizing than when the party was in the opposition and during the electoral campaign. When talking about polarizing topics, we refer to issues that polarize the political debate, such as immigration, civil rights, and the European Union. We also expect that parties moderate in terms of polarity and tones. Indeed, the literature on emotions in political communication highlighted that populist parties tend to exhibit higher emotional levels and greater use of negative emotional appeals. We, therefore, expect populist parties that moderate when becoming government actors also to moderate their emotional intensity and make lesser use of negative emotional claims.

Il passaggio dalla comunicazione elettorale alla comunicazione istituzionale, nella veste di Presidente del Consiglio, ha manifestato un impatto specifico nel caso di Giorgia Meloni. Passata da leader emergente dell'opposizione durante la precedente legislatura, superate le prove difficili di opposizione al governo di unità nazionale e una campagna elettorale estiva, Meloni ha cercato di rimodulare la propria offerta comunicativa, tanto sui social, quanto in eventi e media mainstream, adeguando lo stile di un populismo pragmatico e semplificatorio ad un diverso modello comunicativo. La costruzione di un nuovo modello di comunicazione istituzionale di una leadership autenticamente partigiana è un percorso ancora in trasformazione, ma alcuni elementi significativi sembrano emergere ad una prima riflessione basata sui dati: 1. la prosecuzione della strategia legata alla immagine femminile di prima donna in questa posizione istituzionale; 2.la preferenza per la comunicazione disintermediata dei social, passata dal momento elettorale a quello istituzionale; 3. la sperimentazione di formati specifici (gli Appunti di Giorgia); 4. la costruzione di un immagine pubblica istituzionale ma non apolitica; 5. il registro di autenticità e semplificazione, caratteristico delle leadership populiste; 6. il ricorso ad una personalizzazione comunciativa in grado di bypassare il momento di intermediazione mediale, tenuto ai margini tanto durante la campagna elettorale quanto durante i primi mesi di attività di governo; 7. l’apertura di un account anche su LinkedIn, piattaforma social vocata a un pubblico con interessi professionali. Queste tendenze vengono esplorate nel paper con riferimento ai dati e alle tendenze emerse nella comunicazione elettorale (frequenza di pubblicazione dei contenuti sui social, natura e orientamento degli stessi, engagement, interaction e reaction) e alle tendenze emergenti nei primi sei mesi di attività istituzionale. Metriche e strumenti di analisi vengono impiegati nel contributo al fine di dimostrare che, al netto della differente natura e struttura di comunicazione elettorale e istituzionale, alcuni elementi della leadership comunicativa di Meloni presidente del consiglio traggono continuità dalla comunicazione di Meloni candidata, in una sorta di costruzione di un personal branding specifico e identitario.

Nella società delle piattaforme (Van Dijck, Poell, e De Waal 2018), gli attori politici sono costantemente spinti a rivedere le proprie strategie comunicative per rispondere ai continui cambiamenti che influenzano le dinamiche e i processi di agenda setting (Neuman et al. 2014). Le logiche conversazionali allargate alle non élite e la microframmentazione del pubblico rendono necessario, in questo contesto, l'utilizzo di registri narrativi in cui le culture politiche e mainstream si fondono, dando vita a nuove forme di politica pop che premiano chi riesce a catturare l'attenzione del pubblico per diffondere algoritmicamente il proprio messaggio. Nel contesto politico italiano, Giorgia Meloni si è distinta come una figura di spicco in grado di comprendere e affrontare in modo esemplare queste nuove sfide comunicative. Leader del partito Fratelli d'Italia fin dalla sua fondazione nel 2012, Meloni è riuscita progressivamente a consolidare il suo consenso popolare guadagnando un alto tasso di gradimento a partire dalle elezioni europee del 2019, grazie alla sua marcata opposizione ai governi guidati da Giuseppe Conte e Mario Draghi. Tale opposizione, decisa e coerente con i valori promossi dal suo schieramento, si è dimostrata un fattore determinante per il suo successo, culminando con il risultato alle elezioni del 2022 del 26% di voti per il suo partito, che le ha garantito la nomina a presidente del consiglio. Negli anni, Meloni si è contraddistinta per il suo stile comunicativo populista (Martella e Roncarolo 2023; Mazzoleni e Bracciale 2018), costruito attraverso la rappresentazione come forza di opposizione saldamente schierata dalla parte del popolo e non disposta a fare compromessi o accordi con una élite politica corrotta. Proprio questa rivendicata indipendenza dal sistema istituzionale viene da lei stessa sottolineata attraverso l’autodefinizione di “underdog della politica”, nel suo discorso alla Camera del 26 settembre 2022 per chiedere la fiducia al governo che è pronta a guidare. Ma la sua forza comunicativa risiede anche nella sua abilità di gestire gli attacchi attraverso l'uso dell'ironia, come nel caso di "Io sono Giorgia", che l'ha consacrata come la regina pop della politica italiana. Questo tormentone musicale è diventato rapidamente virale su piattaforme come Instagram e TikTok, scatenando un processo partecipativo che ha coinvolto milioni di utenti. Il pubblico connesso ha contribuito a diffondere e reinterpretare le parole di Meloni in una cascata di contenuti memetici, forme culturali grassroot spesso associate a un consumo leggero di politica. Tale processo di "memizzazione" della politica (Mazzoleni e Bracciale 2019) trasforma i fatti politici in una base per la produzione personale che, una volta condivisa online, può diventare un'arma che influenza il consenso o il dissenso, con conseguenze importanti per la definizione dell'agenda pubblica. Meloni ha sfruttato attivamente le opportunità offerte dai flussi comunicativi che si sono scatenati, anche promuovendo in prima persona "reframe" memetici per distogliere l'attenzione dei pubblici dai messaggi ideologici e politici rivolti contro di lei. La sua partecipazione attiva ai processi memetici si è rivelata una risorsa competitiva preziosa, permettendole di distogliere l'attenzione da argomenti scomodi (Lakoff, 2014). Nonostante il risultato non fosse scontato, la cristallizzazione del suo claim è stata determinata anche da schieramenti ideologicamente distanti che, sottolineando le proprie differenze con Meloni attraverso sue parole chiave, hanno sancito il successo del marchio "Giorgia". Il détournement memetico (Bracciale, 2020) ha dunque giocato un ruolo fondamentale nel trasformare il motto "Io sono Giorgia" in uno slogan indissolubilmente associato a Meloni, conferendole una visibilità senza precedenti. Questo fenomeno è stato così significativo che la leader è stata inclusa nella lista dei venti "astri nascenti" del 2020 stilata dal Times. Tuttavia, il ruolo istituzionale che ricopre oggi come presidente del consiglio richiede un adattamento delle strategie di comunicazione, un territorio ancora inesplorato in termini di impatto e conseguenze (Bobba, McDonnell, 2016; Schwörer, 2022) Il presente studio si propone di analizzare le trasformazioni avvenute nella comunicazione di Giorgia Meloni, passando dal ruolo di opposizione a quello di leader di governo. L'obiettivo è valutare come il modello comunicativo "Io sono Giorgia" si è modificato di fronte all’istituzionalizzazione del ruolo. Per raggiungere tale obiettivo, sono stati presi in considerazione i profili Facebook e Instagram di Meloni durante tre periodi temporali distinti. Il primo periodo è quello pre-elettorale (20/06/2022-14/08/2022), seguito dal periodo elettorale (15/08/22 - 25/09/22), in cui il modello "Io sono Giorgia" era predominante. Infine, è stato analizzato il periodo post-elettorale (26/09/22 - 29/12/22), in cui, in qualità di presidente del consiglio, Meloni ha iniziato a utilizzare il modello comunicativo "Signor Presidente". L'analisi del contenuto dei messaggi è stata integrata con l'uso di tecniche come l'analisi delle componenti principali (MCA) e la clusterizzazione gerarchica (HCPM) al fine di identificare le principali strategie comunicative adottate dalla leader politica e di individuare le trasformazioni che si sono verificate prima e dopo l'insediamento al governo. I risultati ottenuti sono stati dunque correlati all'engagement dei post per valutare l'influenza delle diverse strategie comunicative sulla partecipazione del pubblico e sulla diffusione del messaggio di Giorgia Meloni.

The discursive evolution of left populism in power The communication of Podemos leaders Author: Matteo Giardiello, University of Naples Federico II, matteo.giardiello@unina.it, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9445-8228 Keywords: Populism, Left, Communication, Government Abstract The paper is inserted in the analytical framework which focuses on the effects of populist forces participation in governments. It aims to contribute to the scientific debate analysing the left-wing populists in power in Europe. This phenomenon has gained greater prominence within scholarly and academic analysis, although it does not yet correspond with the importance that some of these forces currently hold in their respective countries. Analyses concerning left-wing populist forces have mainly dealt with a few relevant aspects, such as, to name but a few, the methods of participation, the practices implemented, the digital tools used for internal organisation and external communication, the causes of the sudden electoral success that led them to break into the European political scene, and relations with social movements. However, the same attention has not been paid to the 'institutional moment', also due to the recent temporality of this phenomenon. Precisely for this reason, this analysis intends to investigate the ways in which left-wing populist forces face the challenge of institutionalisation in the European Union scenario and aims to highlight the changes that occur within a populist political force when it reaches important national government positions. More specifically, the research question is about investigating what happens to an outsider force when it comes to government from the point of view of its discursive and communicative dimension towards the outside, which is highly characteristic of the very nature of populist forces. One of the most exemplary cases is undoubtedly 'Podemos': the party founded in 2014 that since January 2020 has been part of the Sánchez II coalition government in Spain. A left-wing populist force is an interesting object of study because it presents alternative and innovative forms of communication compared to the traditional party system. Discourse that develops as a response to social demands for participation and representation of new cleavages ignored or weakly assimilated by European liberal democracies. The adaptation to the functions of government, the entry of the 'new' into the traditional structure, is of fundamental interest if one wishes to analyse not only the change in the party communication, but the very evolution of European party system. The change in populist communication in government thus appears to be an important element to analyse. It is considered here that it is incorrect to speak of “moderation” of the language of populist in power. Thus, it is intended to show that the change is not about a decrease in the degree of populism, but rather a change in characteristics: from a more transversal communication, i.e., the 'high-low' axis as the predominant rhetoric of opposition to power, to a communication more responsive to the themes and ideological characteristics of the political force. Not only a change of content, but also of "the people" and, therefore, of the target electorate, making greater use of the differences resulting from positioning on the left-right axis. This hypothesis is in line with the investigation that is being carried out by scholars on these issues using Podemos as a case study, since it manifests interesting characteristics and lines of evolution and identifies digital communication as one of its main strategic assets. The construction of a descriptive paradigm of this evolution, which will also be applicable to similar case studies, it is one of the main objectives of the research. The discourse qualitative analysis was conducted using the Nvivo software, through which it was possible to carefully collect and identify the most recurrent terms, group them according to a chronological criterion and graphically summarize them through word clouds. Through the software, it was also possible to reconstruct profile publication statistics. It was decided to analyse the personal Twitter profiles of Pablo Iglesias, Irene Montero and Ione Belarra since they are the centre of political communication in both the electoral and post-electoral and governmental moments and because they are the leading figures who have held or hold institutional positions at a national level. The organization’s official profile was also analysed using the same method. Through Fanpage Karma, the same profiles on the social platform Facebook were analysed. The analysis was implemented by the use through semi-structured interviews conducted between May and November 2022 with leading members of the party and Spanish government.

In the post-war era, European polities have used a variety of incorporation mechanisms to integrate their newly found and quickly growing Muslim populations. In several cases, the strategy has been to offer material benefits to Muslim communities in order to incentivize cooperation with the state’s regulatory apparatus. Yet while several federal mandates have promised these benefits to religious communities, some sub-national governments have been slower to offer them in practice than others. Furthermore, even when these benefits have been offered, reactions to them have been mixed; while some Muslim leaders have indeed accepted the purported olive branch and entered into collaborative relationships with the state, others still have shunned state-led efforts and left substantial material benefits on the table. The uneven and incomplete incorporation of Muslim communities in Europe raises several questions: first, why have sub-national units differed in their implementation of shared federal mandates, and how do they do so? What explains why some sub-national governments have been quicker to incorporate Islam than others? Moreover, and as far as the religious leadership themselves are concerned, why have Muslim leaders reached different decisions in terms of opting into the state’s bureaucratic framework? How do they understand, and ultimately decide to work with, state incorporation policies? I address these questions by examining if, when, and how regional governments in Belgium decide to implement incorporation mandates set at the federal level. I conduct a comparative analysis of how the Belgian regions of Wallonia, Flanders & Brussels decide to 'officially recognize' their mosque-communities. I examine both the shifting positions of the state, and how religious leaders themselves navigate and respond to state overtures. I rely on a mixed methods approach that uses observational data on the mosque as a unit of analysis, semi-structured interviews with both state officials and religious leadership, and a qualitative comparative analysis of legal texts over time and across space. Missing from literature on incorporation is a consideration of both how local officials implement federal mandates, and of how Muslim leaders respond strategically to choices made by local officials. In short, it takes a two to incorporate. To account for this, I propose a relational theory of incorporation that understands incorporation outcomes as a product of the oft repeated, and at times dynamic, interactions between both sets of actors in the state-Islam diad. I argue that two axes explain the nature of state-mosque relations in Europe: party competition at the local level, and the network capacity available to an individual mosque. Partisanship and party competition determine the electoral goals driving policy implementation. Consequently, I show that the same national policies can be implemented in highly divergent ways. To demonstrate this difference, I develop a combative-cooperative typology of incorporation and show that religious leaders perceive incorporation as more constraining when it's implemented by right-wing actors. In the Belgian case, I show that state recognition in Wallonia and Brussels is perceived by religious leaders as qualitatively different from recognition in Flanders. I then use this explanation of state-sided dynamics to examine whether Muslim leaders decide to cooperate with or shun state-led incorporation efforts. I argue that in a highly fraught political context, religious leaders often face significant scrutiny when ignoring state aid, and thus may have non-material incentives to opt into the state's regulatory apparatus. I show that religious leaders often choose to incorporate not for material gain, but to avoid the suspicion that not being incorporated may bring. This explains why mosques that are well-positioned to replace the state may end up collaborating with the state anyway. Therefore, contingent on the partisanship of state officials, which denotes the political goal driving incorporation and the threat of state control that Muslim leaders perceive, networks can either act as a substitute or compliment to the decision to work with the state. As the literature suggests, networks can indeed provide finances and act as an exit option to state aid; I argue, however, that Muslim leaders only decide to use networks as such when they're facing combative incorporation. However, when incorporation is cooperative the threat of state control is perceived to be low, networks can also facilitate state relations through resource and information-sharing. Consequently, I show how state-mosque relations can take on vastly different forms within the same national, and even local, context. This article makes several contributions. I add to the church-state hypothesis literature, which concludes that European states impose whatever framework they had to govern their churches onto their newly found Muslim communities. While this may be true, I trace the politicization of these frameworks and show how they can expand beyond their scope and come to signal the value of Muslim communities themselves. I then discuss the consequences of this development on incorporation outcomes. I show that incorporation is neither static nor uniform; instead, it can assume various forms, each driven by how parties seek votes at the local level. I also show that, under certain conditions, incorporation policies are not only a tool for minority groups to extract concessions from the state, but also a way for the state itself to co-opt voters and engage in patronage politics. In so doing, I speak to academic scholarship on bureaucratic responsiveness and local governance.

Migration and globalization phenomena have not yet propelled a complete reconceptualization of the role of religion in political fora; rather, they have uncovered contradictions and polarization practices at the heart of the secular-religious dichotomies of our age. Despite a relatively recent attention on the part of scholars and practitioners over the last twenty years, the interlink between forced displacement and religion has gained growing attention; in turn, appraisals of this nexus have fostered analyses at the intersection of different sub-disciplines in Politics, including research on humanitarianism, civil society networks and policy analysis to shed further light on the relationship between religious and secular political actors. This paper therefore investigates how religious organisations interpret and engage with secular frameworks and discourses to strategically achieve their goals. In doing so it equally investigates the extent to which religious aid actors are welcomed and/or marginalised in the humanitarian sector. To probe into these questions, the paper analyses one specific theocratic institution, namely the Roman Catholic Church and its mediating role between local aid organisations and multilevel governance in migration politics. The 21st Century Catholic Church has indeed signalled a paradigmatic shift towards a theology of migration enriched by a global perspective of transnational governance, as demonstrated, inter alia, by the creation of the Migrants and Refugees Section within the Vatican’s newly reformed Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development during Pope Francis’ pontificate. Scholars have also increasingly identified the Roman Catholic Church as the most influential religious transnational actor. Yet, the presence of Catholic institutions in European and global affairs is met by a disproportionate lack of academic research in Politics with regards to the Roman Catholic Church, and even less so with regards to its governing body, the Holy See. Whilst other disciplines have traditionally studied the history, legality and theologies underpinning the Holy See’s relations with secular powers, research on faith-based humanitarianism in contexts of forced migration started to engage with local and transnational religious actors only in the early 2000s; this growing literature nonetheless overlooks analyses of the Church in relation to its NGOs (CNGOs) and to secular political institutions at the local, national, regional, and global levels. Likewise, extensive research on Catholic organisations and displacement is lacking due to the under-appreciation of the two-fold nature of the Church; by acting as a non-state religious institution (Catholicism) and as a state actor invested with international subjectivity and personality (the Holy See), the Catholic Church can engage on multiple levels with secular organisations in ways that no other religion or state can replicate. Informed by an iterative qualitative methodology based on case studies, this paper presents new data collected in Italy and in the Vatican City State via key informant interviews with officials of the Holy See, policy makers and humanitarian practitioners. Initial results uncover tensions at the secular-religious divide that include, and transcend, traditional liberal/conversative cleavages around the conceptualization of families, bioethics, gender, and LGBTQ+ rights; competition amongst Catholic actors, identity-driven agendas, as well as the lack of religious literacy amongst secular humanitarians are just some of the instances where new “faces” of Religion in Politics come to the fore. This paper’s analysis is further underpinned by new participatory data collected observing such dynamics at play on the field with one Catholic humanitarian organisation over five months. Through its interdisciplinary analysis of the “local”, yet equally “global”, network of CNGOs engaged with forced migrants, this paper thus envisages contributing to the reassessment of the “faces” of Religion in Politics; it equally opens to further opportunities for scholars interested in moral perspectives negotiated by transnational religious actors in IR, the EU, and migration policy making. Keywords: The Holy See - Catholic NGOs - Political Secularism - Religion - Humanitarianism - Migration - FBOs

It is a well-known fact that the Balkan national identities are tightly interwoven with religion, and that Balkan religious elites often enjoy substantial political clout as a result of connections with government and in their role as opinion leaders. Yet, we know little, or almost nothing, about how religious institutions and values are shaping politics and society in the post-conflict Kosovar society. This issue became even more important after the 1999 Kosovo war, and particularly after the 2008 Kosovo's Declaration of Independence. Nowadays, 15 years after the Declaration, the very position of Kosovo still remains a highly contested topic in the international arena, and particularly in the Balkans. In this paper I will show how religion matters for politics in the contemporary Kosovar society. Thus, in what ways religion affects politics in the post-conflict Kosovo? How do religious variables affect attitudes about whether and how to balance religious traditions in post-conflict Kosovo? And finally, what influences might religion have on preferences between democratic and authoritarian rule, and the legitimacy of social and political institutions? My presentation will be based on my empirical research in Kosovo, fielded in September-October 2022 (N=600, f2f), and 10 in-depth interviews with clergy members from the Islamic community of Kosovo, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the Catholic Church. My survey data are primarily intended to allow analysis of how religious values and ethnic identity shape the way people in today’s Kosovo think about their new post-conflict circumstances. However, as religious institutions and actors matter just as much, I included clergy interviews in order to illuminate how key representatives of religious institutions in Kosovo are thinking about social and political issues.

The literature on the presence of religion in the public sphere has always been interested in understanding the main issues on which religious actors are called upon to intervene. Among the different scholars, there is certainly Casanova (1994; 2008) with his studies on the 'public role of religion', understood as the capacity of religious institutions to influence the main issues that challenge today's societies and their governments, raising questions and proposals on the basis of their own value systems and moral codes. The processes of secularisation in recent decades (Norris, Inglehart 2007; Casanova 2011; Habermas 2018) have not inhibited the ability of religious institutions to participate - and thus be legitimised to do so - in the public debate, imposing their own issues or frames (interpretations) to the issues at the centre of the discussion. This is because the different churches have always played a fundamental role within societies, assisting the action of local and national governments on welfare issues (e.g. the role of the Catholic third sector, but also Catholic schools), as well as agencies of socialisation (Norris, Inglehart 2007). All these elements have legitimised religious institutions - individually or collectively - to have a voice in the debate, sometimes opposing governments themselves on ethical and moral issues (such as that of civil unions or the issues of abortion and euthanasia) and carrying out a real advocacy action. But what happens in Italy, which is considered an exception because of the presence and role that the Catholic Church has always played in the public sphere? The present study aims to investigate the Italian case by analysing the coverage of the Catholic Church by the Italian press over a period of 17 years, trying to detect the main issues on which the Church has been more legitimised over time to intervene in the public debate. The study therefore moves from the assumption that in Italy it is still the Catholic Church that monopolises the discourse on religion, even after so many years and in a profoundly changed social and religious context (Garelli 2020). 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. In total, 202,788 articles were collected and analyzed through a topic modeling analysis (by QDA Miner and WordStat tools). Results suggest that the main topics on which the Catholic Church has been covered are consistent with those developed in the literature as issues on which religions are traditionally legitimised to intervene, recognising the public role of religion (Lövheim 2019). These are mostly particularly divisive issues on which the Catholic Church intervenes in accordance with its own value universe and by advocating its own frames to the issues under discussion. They are also issues on which the Catholic Church has a recognised issue ownership, also carrying out advocacy actions. At the same time, the analysis also confirms the transformation of some issues that have been declined in different ways over time, thus indicating a coverage that, although focused on specific recursive issues, change its nature over time. The present research is a development of the study presented at the last Sisp conference (2022) in which we showed first of all how the general trend of the coverage of the Catholic Church denies the literature claim about an increase in the visibility of religion in the public debate.

The standing relationship among religiosity, politics and party preference has always been a crucial issue for both political sociology and electoral studies. Even though many studies have claimed that the relation between religious identities and party choice has become increasingly weaker in the last decades (cf Wellhofer & Ignazi, 2011), the effect of religious beliefs and practice on voting behavior still remains a prolific topic for at least two main reasons. First and foremost, for a contextual issue. If secularization processes triggered a deep evolution in how people deal with religion and develop their own beliefs and practice, especially in the West, this relation can advance at a different pace in different institutional and political contexts. In this regard, there is evidence that Italy is on the same path of diffuse religious decline as the other European countries, but it has also been noted a period of religious stability at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s (Vezzoni & Biolcati-Rinaldi, 2015). The impact of this peculiar pattern on systems of belief and practices – and party preferences of course – is still underexplored. Second, for a party competition reason. The relationship between individual religiosity and vote choice has increasingly gained new lights concurrently with the growing favorable electoral results obtained by radical right parties throughout Europe. Such an electoral success has progressively called for a reconceptualization of the effect of religiosity on voting behavior, because, on the one hand, the radical right family is tightly connected to conservative and traditionalist issues, while on the other hand religious electors tend not to vote massively for them, or at least most of regular churchgoers tend to prefer more moderate alternatives (Immerzeel et al., 2013). This is why we see much fewer works studying the relation between religious practice and voting behavior compared to the past. Conversely, newer research shows an increase of religious references within conservative and radical right parties’ political programs, as they use these references in a traditionalist frame or by shaping an “us vs them” rhetoric against immigration, especially against Muslims (Schwörer & Fernández-García, 2021). In conclusion, the whole breeding ground of political competition seems to have changed, and the classic contrast between religious and secular voters which purportedly gave birth to confessional parties and fueled party identification for many years seems to have gradually given way to a newer conflict between traditionalists and liberals (Bornschier, 2010). Therefore, the debate has moved from what religion means to what religion may fuel. Given these considerations, our proposal contributes to the debate by analyzing the role of religion in the latest Italian elections under a new light. Specifically, we focus on what sociology of religions calls “cultural Catholicism”. This phenomenon refers to people who identify as Catholics even though they do not practice their faith regularly nor they coherently follow religious commands; still they cling to religion as a repository of traditions and values. By using this category, we combine indicators of both religious affiliation and practice, which allows to overcome the usually linear and unidimensional concept of religiosity, making it possible to investigate more identity and culture related aspects of religiosity. Furthermore, the role of cultural Catholicism has been recently analyzed with relation to political attitudes towards immigration, LGBT issues, abortion, and other ethical topics with interesting results (cf Ladini et al., 2021). Our research aims at assessing whether being part of this category holds meaningful direct effects on vote choice or on the development of attitudes that may place voters closer to specific parties. By using the newest ITANES dataset, we first combine the religious identity and religious attendance variables in order to develop an indicator that can discriminate among religious churchgoers, religious unregular or non-churchgoers, and non-religious. Then, we show the emergence of specific opinions on different issues for each of these categories, highlighting attitudinal specificities and confirming value-based differences that set religious churchgoers and cultural Catholics apart. Finally, we focus on the relationship between these categories and parties by analyzing main parties’ electoral composition, by relating religious indicators to the probability to vote for a party (with a specific focus on differences between radical right and moderate center-right parties) and to the emergence of sets of values and attitudes that may fuel party identification. References Bornschier, Simon. 2010. “The New Cultural Divide and the Two-dimensional Political Space in Western Europe.” West European Politics 33 (3): 419–444. Immerzeel, T., Jaspers, E., & Lubbers, M. (2013). Religion as catalyst or restraint of radical right voting?. West European Politics, 36(5), 946-968. Ladini, R., Biolcati, F., Molteni, F., Pedrazzani, A., & Vezzoni, C. (2021). The multifaceted relationship between individual religiosity and attitudes toward immigration in contemporary Italy. International Journal of Sociology, 51(5), 390-411. Schwörer, J., & Fernández-García, B. (2021). Religion on the rise again? A longitudinal analysis of religious dimensions in election manifestos of Western European parties. Party Politics, 27(6), 1160-1171. Vezzoni, C., & Biolcati‐Rinaldi, F. (2015). Church attendance and religious change in Italy, 1968–2010: A multilevel analysis of pooled datasets. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 54(1), 100-118. Wellhofer, E., & Ignazi, P. (2011). The Decline of Religious Voting in Italy in the'First Republic'(1953-1992). In APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper.

Affective polarisation (AP) captures partisan animus – the emotional rift between political opponents rooted in people’s tendency to have a more positive affect towards co-partisans than political opponents. AP has increased in the US and in the UK, but there is still much debate on the causes of this phenomenon. Recent studies suggest that internet usage may increase AP through exposure to polarising content, but the theory is ambiguous. Moreover, extant research focuses overwhelmingly on the emblematic US case, and it often falls short of establishing a causal relationship. Finally, it is unclear whether affective polarisation is growing because of stronger positive sentiment towards the co-partisans, greater animosity between political opponents, or both simultaneously. Against this background, I propose to identify the causal effect of internet usage on AP in the United Kingdom. I then assemble a dataset merging newly released large-N geocoded panel data on individual behaviour with postcode-level data on internet performance. This enables me to leverage exogenous variations in internet usage at the individual level, where internet usage in each wave is instrumented by time-varying local-level measures of internet performance – which depend on local infrastructure developments and are thus independent of individual characteristics. I show that exposure to online political content has a positive and significant effect on AP, of a magnitude comparable to the effect of political interest. Naïve and fixed-effects regressions show that moving from the lowest to the highest level of consumption would lead to an increase in partisan animus of about 10 to 15%. The IV strategy fails due to a null result in the first stage. Since the instrument is theoretically sound, this finding may either (1) reveal that connection speed affects general internet consumption, but not online information consumption, or (2) reveal that using the instrument at the mSOA level fails due to underlying variation in connection speed at sub-mSOA level. Further investigation outstanding.

It is widely recognized that social media and digital platforms play a critical role in facilitating interaction and communication between political parties, their leaders, and the general public (i.e., Enli & Skogerbø 2013; Lachapelle & Maarek 2015; Barbera et al. 2021). The current body of literature on political parties and communication has made a significant contribution to the understanding of how the integration of new technologies have affected the organizational change and the very functioning of political parties (i.e., Gibson and Ward 2009; Gibson 2015; Barbera et al. 2021; Dommett et al. 2021). Indeed, given the weakening of organizational structure, the decrease in both territorial rootedness, and financial strength political parties have resorted to digital tools to enhance their resilience. In this respect, new technologies and social media platforms have emerged as prominent arenas for interaction and communication, enabling political parties and leaders to directly engage with their supporters and activists. The implications for politics and contemporary democracies are significant, and according to some research, critical. It is still unclear whether these tools can effectively build an active supporter base in the long term and to what degree (i.e. Gibson et al. 2018; Kalsnes 2016; Theocharis et al 2022). In addition, some studies have indicated that political parties may turn to outsourcing tasks in order to optimize their use of digital tools, but this can result in a lack of control over the organizational apparatus (i.e., Dommett et al 2021). This, in turn, can facilitate and accentuate dynamics of personalization and centralization of power on leaders. The literature extensively explored the ways in which political parties utilize social media and the resulting effects of their usage. There exist several studies that have analyzed the use of social media during election campaigns (i.e., Klinger 2013; Spierings & Jacobs 2019; Cepernich & Bracciale 2019; Giglietto et al 2019), while other studies have focused more precisely on the nature of parties and leaders resorting to social media communication (Engesser et al. 2017; Ernst et al. 2019; Jakobs et al 2020; Bracciale et al 2021). Other research has instead provided interesting findings on the impact of social media communication by parties and leaders focusing on agenda dynamics and patterns of user engagement (i.e. Ennser-Jedenastik 2022; Gilardi et al 2022; Bene et al. 2022). More recently, literature has focused on the use of paid contents and political advertising on social media, investigating strategies and dynamics of digital targeting during election campaign and their potential impact at the individual level (Echeverria 2023; Kruschinski et al. 2022; Baviera et al. 2022; Hopp & Vargo 2017). However, with a few exceptions (i.e., Kruschinski & Bene, 2022; Bene et al. 2022), many of these research focus on single case studies or they focus their attention on a limited set of political and media contexts. Furthermore, we still lack research specifically focused on investigating how contextual factors - such as the political and party systems, and organizational features of the parties and their leadership – may have an impact on the use of social media beyond election campaign. In order to fill this gap, this paper aims to provide a broader perspective on how (and how much) political parties rely to social media in both election and routine time. More precisely, the paper investigates the Facebook production in terms of both contents and paid advertising and the kind of engagement produced. We rely on an original dataset focusing on Facebook, which represents the most extensively utilized social media platforms in Europe (We are Europe 2023). Our dataset encompasses the Facebook activity of over 120 official public pages of European political parties and leaders over 12 months in 2022. We collected engagement data for each post, which included the number of likes, shares, and comments; we also collected data about paid advertising on Facebook identifying the amount of money invested by parties and leaders in this activity. This paper examines the characteristics of the dataset and conducts exploratory analyses on a set of different dependent variables: (a) social media activity volume; (b) engagement; (c) advertising volume; (d) advertising financial effort. The study considers a range of independent variables, relating to both communication and political context, including: (I) social media features such as fanbase, content type, and message length; (II) political features such as party size, party age, government vs. opposition role, populist vs. mainstream, and ideological positioning (according to CHES data); and (III) leadership features – age, gender, and mandate length.

Radical-right populist parties will often try to exploit and ride a wave of popular discontent for their own electoral gain. This paper studies the online communication of the leaders of the Rassemblement National (RN) in France in the context of the Gilets Jaunes (GJ) protests and the 2019 European election. It analyses the Twitter activity of these leaders to determine whether they temporarily softened their nativist stances to align their communications with the demands of the protest movement. We explored this question by employing a quantitative text analysis using R Studio tools of their tweets over a 12-month period in combination with a more qualitative analysis of their output on this social media platform. We carried out tests on word frequency, network structure, as well as qualitative analysis of posts on the GJ protests and then compared this data with existing works on the GJ, to identify whether and how the RN adapted its social media discourse at strategic times in the election cycle to better suit the Gilets Jaunes’ populist demands and themes. The results provide support for the hypothesis of a strategic modification and moderation of nativist discourse online with both politicians returning to nativist themes after the European election campaign was over and the GJ mobilisation lost momentum. We therefore suggest that the change in output is part of a strategic moderation or ‘de-demonisation’ in order to gain a wider pool of potential voters and in particular those sympathetic to the protest movement.

The political communication landscape of Western democracies has for at least two decades been in a major flux of change, technological with socio-political spillovers, that has transformed the ways in which 21st-century citizens consume information about politics and, consequently, the ways in which elites produce political information for citizens (Persily and Tucker 2020). These spillovers, particularly evident and studied in campaign contexts, carry over into "between election" phase when winning leaders and parties form government and are tasked with transforming citizens' questions into public policy. When, in other words, they are called upon to demonstrate their responsiveness. But the shift to a more digital, more mobile and platform-dominated media environment (Nielsen and Fletcher 2020), has provided leaders in government with new strategic tools for agenda manipulation (Carrieri 2021), such that symbolic (Eulau and Karps 1977) or even rhetorical (Hobolt and Klemmensen 2008) responsiveness is guaranteed - traceable in discourse, but not in policy. For governments, being able to prove themselves receptive even if only at the level of public discourse can ensure trust and mandate stability, an outcome often undermined by the tendency toward instability in 21st-century governments (Collins 1989, Diskin et al. 2005, Dutt 2015) and voter volatility (Chung 1996), both of which are spies of a deeper change in Western democracies, having to do with general disaffection with politics (Torcal and Montero 2006). At the same time, if perceived responsiveness (in discourses) is not matched by actual responsiveness (in policies), it is the quality of democracy itself that suffers (Morlino et al. 2013). How then does policy communication affect levels of government responsiveness? What factors make the most effective impact? Do leaders in government manipulate through discourse the opinions of citizens on specific issues to prove themselves responsive? This paper aims to provide a critical review of the literature on the topic, seeking to bring into dialogue both studies on responsiveness and more recent studies on the role of political communication in the age of social media and the digital revolution. The research represents the first step - of theoretical reflection - of a larger PhD project, which involves comparative empirical analysis of democratic governments in four European states (Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece) through mixed method analysis, over the period 2008-2022. The methodology adopted for the project involves statistical analysis of data from secondary sources (Eurobarometer, European Social Survey, V-dem, World Values Survey) as a means of measuring levels of government responsiveness in the case studies, and qualitative analysis of political discourse, with reference to the leaders in government during the periods of interest. In particular, the most widely used indicators measuring receptivity in the literature – satisfaction with democracy and trust in institutions (Morlino and Quaranta 2014, Ceron and Memoli 2015) – will be derived assessed in relation to citizens' digital skills and data on their media diet. Speeches by leaders in government (presidents of the council) will be selected and analyzed based on specific issues, the salience of which in the period of interest is extrapolated from data on public opinion (issues most felt by the population). The hypotheses underlying the research work are as follows: H1: Given the importance of political communication, we expect that leaders' speeches in government on specific issues have spillovers on responsiveness. H1a: Governments have manipulated the political agenda by trying to emphasize those issues on which they have enjoyed greater credibility in order to appear more responsive. H2: It is a matter of ascertaining whether and how responsive citizens consider governments based on the strategic choices of government leaders in speeches. In empirical terms, we expect that by measuring the weight of various issues in guiding people's opinion on the responsiveness of government leaders in their country, citizens gave more weight to those issues that were most emphasized by the government in public speeches. H2a: Government elites have manipulated the context through both the use of legal instruments and the attribution of responsibility to supranational and international institutions. Although this is work in its preliminary stages, the basic idea stands in contrast to mainstream research on manipulation, which so far has focused more on voting propensity, as a predictor of electoral outcomes, and less on the construction and development of trust relationships between rulers and citizens, as a guarantee of an effective democratic system. To be concerned with investigating the ways in which political communication in the digital age affects the dual direction of rulers and ruled is to check whether leaders are influenced by citizens or citizens by leaders at the most delicate stage of the political mandate, the one in which the choices that will improve (or worsen) everyone's life are produced. Even before words turn into actions, then, it is crucial to identify the ways in which-through discourse-priorities are constructed and policies implemented and, most importantly, whether there is congruence between them.

La concomitanza delle elezioni Politiche e regionali in Sicilia del 25 Settembre 2022 costituisce un unicum per l’analisi del comportamento elettorale all’interno di un contesto che possiamo definire quasi sperimentale. In un quadro nazionale di riduzione della partecipazione, l’election-day in Sicilia rende manifesta una crescita dell’astensione più contenuta che altrove in ragione di effetti contrapposti: da una parte, la peculiare composizione del corpo elettorale (iscritti A.I.R.E., residenti ‘apparenti’, ecc.) in un’area interessata da fenomeni di emigrazione; dall’altra, una mobilitazione elettorale differenziata e rafforzata - nel caso delle regionali - dalla ricerca del del voto di preferenza. Lo studio si concentra sull’analisi della geografia elettorale e socio-economica interna delle due principali città metropolitane della Sicilia: Palermo e Catania. Le unità d’analisi sono le sezioni elettorali, utilizzate pure per l’articolazione del territorio in micro-aree di interesse statistico. Il dato emerso dalle urne evidenzia una profonda divergenza tra le Politiche che premiano ancora una volta il M5S e le regionali con un ampio consenso alla coalizione di centro-destra e a formazioni di matrice locale. L’analisi riguarda il comportamento di voto e non-voto nelle due elezioni rispetto alle implicazioni dovute alla personalizzazione del voto di preferenza che, in alcuni casi, è determinante per l’affermazione elettorale della lista. Le ipotesi esplicative considerano come probabili determinanti delle scelte elettorali il sistema delle regole, la struttura dell’offerta partitica e la selezione del candidato all’interno delle liste provinciali in occasione delle elezioni regionali nel quadro dell’analisi di specifiche caratteristiche contestuali.

Il PD sembra sempre più caratterizzarsi come una sostanziale incompiuta. Nato a partire dall’intuizione strategica che fosse necessario chiamare a a raccolta le diverse componenti riformiste disperse in diversi soggetti politici del centro-sinistra, offrendo loro una casa in un partito a vocazione maggioritaria, si è ritrovato a riprodurre al proprio interno l’irriducibile tensione fra radicali e riformisti (alimentata da tre diverse “anime”: quella etica, intransigente e radical-libertaria, quella laburista e social-democratica tradizionale e quella pragmatica e libera-democratica) che caratterizza storicamente l’esperienza della sinistra italiana, dentro un contenitore partito che, dopo un decennio trascorso al governo del paese, viene oggi paradossalmente considerato dagli elettori un partito inadeguato a governare. Veltroni, Franceschini, Bersani, Epifani, Renzi, Martina, Zingaretti, Letta e Schlein: nove segretari in soli 16 anni, con una media di quasi un diverso segretario ogni due anni, forniscono chiaramente l’immagine di un partito politico instabile. Un’instabilità da attribuire alla difficile convivenza sperimentata all’interno di quella organizzazione fra le sue diverse anime politiche. Lo spazio politico all’interno del Partito democratico, per come può essere descritto da tre diverse angolature (elettori, selettori, delegati dell’Assemblea nazionale) resta fortemente polarizzato. E ciò può essere chiaramente messo in luce considerando le due principali dimensioni di tale spazio politico dal punto di vista delle policy, quella economico-sociale (orientamento pro-market vs pro Labour) e quella etico-morale (orientamenti pro-life vs pro-choice). Ma non solo: anche rispetto al campo dei principle, i valori di riferimento, inerente le valutazioni espresse sui valori principali che le persone riconoscono come criteri guida della loro vita, riconducibili a un orientamento individuale autotrascendentale o autorealizzativo, secondo la nota tipologia psicologica di Shalom Schwartz (1992 e 1994). In base ad evidenze empiriche, che cercheremo di mettere in luce utilizzando dati di sondaggio relativi a autocollocazione e orientamenti valoriali e di policy di elettori (rilevazioni demoscopiche Ipsos PA), selettori (sondaggi CA&LS, laddove disponibili) e delegati nazionali del PD (sondaggi Dipartimento di Scienze sociali e politiche, Università degli studi di Milano), diviene possibile descrivere lo spazio politico interno a quel partito come un campo irriducibilmente conteso. Dove sono “costretti" a coesistere orientamenti valoriali, quindi politico-culturali, e di policy molto differenti tra loro, che costituiscono il primo vero fattore di ostacolo alla costruzione di una più omogenea identità e cultura politica. E dove il rapido succedersi di leadership e strategie politiche diverse ha ulteriormente contribuito a polarizzare gli orientamenti di elettori e dirigenti del PD, impedendo la costruzione di una struttura della rappresentanza coerente e stabile. Si cercherà di esaminare gli orientamenti di policy pro-life/pro-choice e pro-labour/pro-market, facendoli interagire con le disposizioni valoriali inerenti la propensione individuale all’autorealizzazione o all’autotrascendenza. E si cercherà di verificare in che misura tali orientamenti e disposizioni siano o meno collegati all’autocollocazione politica. Lo si farà dapprima considerando i delegati nazionali delle diverse Assemblee nazionali che si sono succedute nel tempo, dal 2007 al 2023. E poi, utilizzando delle proxy, si proverà ad analizzare gli stessi orientamenti nell’ambito degli elettori e dei selettori del PD. Al fine di mettere in luce come ciò che dopo 16 anni di vita politica rende ancora oggi il PD un’incompiuta possa avere in larga prevalenza a che fare con l’elevato grado di frammentazione e polarizzazione che contraddistingue il suo spazio politico interno.

Nell’ultimo anno si è registrata una crescita rilevante dell’astensionismo nelle elezioni politiche, regionali e amministrative. La crescita è stata però differenziata in relazione ai contesti territoriali e al tipo di competizione che si è sviluppata. Sulla decisione di non andare a votare ha certamente pesato – e continua a pesare - la crescita della sfiducia nei partiti e nelle istituzioni rappresentative. In passato questi atteggiamenti erano più diffusi nei ceti popolari e tra gli elettori con i livelli di istruzione più bassi. Ma la crescita recente dell’astensionismo è stata influenzata anche dai cambiamenti della configurazione del sistema dei partiti italiani. Nel 2018 il Movimento 5 stelle aveva ottenuto molti consensi riuscendo anche ad assorbito alcune aree elettorali tradizionalmente orientate all’astensione. Dopo le sue esperienze di governo aveva però perso molti voti favorendo in particolare crescita dell’astensionismo. La fine del governo Draghi ha permesso alle formazioni politiche di centrodestra la formazione di una coalizione sufficientemente compatta, in grado di mobilitare il suo potenziale elettorale elettorato per il voto nelle successive tornate elettorali. Le forze politiche che si sono opposte al centrodestra non sono invece riuscite a convergere su scelte politiche condivise. Sono state sconfitte nelle elezioni nazionali del 2022 e hanno parzialmente perso la capacità di mobilitazione per le successive tornate elettorali. Una parte non trascurabile del loro potenziale elettorato ha scelto perciò l’astensione, soprattutto nelle elezioni regionali e amministrative nelle quali era probabile la vittoria dei candidati di centrodestra. In definitiva, l’astensionismo che, fino a 3-4 anni orsono, favoriva chiaramente la sinistra, ora pare aver mutato direzione, dando maggiori chance di vittoria alla destra. Una situazione che appariva un tempo ben chiara; se l’elettorato di sinistra era più informato, più interessato alla politica, la defezione incrementale alle urne tendeva a favorire le vittorie dei suoi candidati. Oggi non è più così. Con qualche importante ma rara eccezione, a cominciare dal 2019 (le Europee che videro stravincere Salvini) in quasi tutte le occasioni successive, demarcate da una costante progressiva riduzione del turnout, le vittorie sono andate nella direzione opposta. Perfino i ballottaggi – che alcuni esponenti della destra volevano ridimensionare perché vedevano troppo favoriti i candidati di sinistra – hanno sortito l’effetto esattamente contrario: il divario tra le due aree politiche tende a crescere in favore appunto della destra tra il primo e il secondo turno.

In this paper proposal, the shared framework and data is the design and preliminary results of the ongoing research named as “Political Socialization of the High-School Students in Istanbul*”, which is a project supported & funded by TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). Political socialization simply refers the education and transfer of political norms, values, systems and figures to the individual-citizens in the political systems to be good citizens (Greenstein, 1969). And today, the existence and use of digital media obviously has been transforming the transfer and education process for entire age cohorts. The research question and motivation in the project is to photograph the impact of digital media use on the phenomenon of political socialization for high-school students in the cosmopolitan heartland of Turkey, Istanbul. While opting for this unpopular age cohort is one of the original value of the research, the following contribution is to ask the “how” question on the determination of the overlapping impact of (the agents of) family, friends and digital media regarding the political socialization. The method is simply qualitative: the data-gathering by the (face-to-face) interviewing, the data-analysis by descriptive and/or content analysis. Over 1 million high-school students has been registered in Istanbul and at about 70 participants are accepted tolerable for the conduct of research in reference to the recommended literature. The question set is comprised of 26 questions under the categories of “demography, family relations, social sphere/cohort relations, digital media use and politisation”. And the preliminary results demonstrate the changing gravity between the 3 categories (agents), so to speak, the family, social sphere and digital media over the political socialization of this age cohort. This project from Turkish sample encounters with the goal of this panel: “The formation and operation of younger generations’” political behaviors, tendency and interest. *The paper presenter (Dr. Halime S.Atalay) is the advisor of the project, and the project coordinator (Rabia Yılmaz) is her student in the department in Istanbul. This presentation will be performed by the advisor with the consent of the coordinator (the student herself) of the project. The language barrier of the coordinator is the main reason for research’s presentation by the advisor. Approval of Ethics Committee and the related report has been received in April 2023.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez non è solo la più giovane deputata del Congresso degli Stati Uniti, ma anche il personaggio politico (Trump a parte) più riconoscibile nell'attuale contesto americano. Dal giorno della sua clamorosa vittoria elettorale, Ocasio-Cortez ha saputo costruire e proporre un'identità solida e convincente, capace di distinguersi grazie al raffinato sistema di comunicazione con cui ha saputo presentare il suo personal brand. In questo senso, dalla grafica dei manifesti all'uso dei social media, nulla è stato lasciato al caso: AOC (questo è l'acronimo con cui viene abitualmente indicata) è riuscita a ritagliarsi uno spazio autonomo di autenticità e credibilità che, pur non sovrapponendosi sempre agli obiettivi e alle pratiche dell'establishment democratico, è già diventato un modello per molti dei suoi colleghi più anziani e, naturalmente, per il suo elettorato. Alla base di questo imprevedibile processo di affermazione c'è la creazione di un infratesto articolato e ben definito, oltre che perfettamente coerente con le sue proposte politiche.

Technological innovations and social media advent are significantly affecting the political sphere. This is especially true with regards to the political communication field, for which these channels have represented a potentially disruptive upheaval, increasing the actors able to shape the agenda (Gilardi et al., 2022) and fostering processes such as polarization and dis-intermediation (Baum & Groeling, 2008). The rise of Web 2.0 has also resulted in other significant transformations, redefining ways of interacting and reshaping information consumption behaviours. Social networks have indeed become a relevant source of information (Westerman et al., 2014; Shearer, 2018; Hermida et al., 2012) and definitely the main one for younger generations (Boczkowski et al., 2018; Edgerly et al., 2018). Therefore, today social media play a very relevant role in shaping people's opinions (Diehl et al., 2016; Li et al., 2017; Gündüç, 2020): users do not simply receive information passively, but they can actively spread their own, creating discussion and pushing other users to take position on issues. These considerations impact most on new generations, the main users of these new media (Geers, 2020). Studying new generations implies focusing more on political socialization, and the ways ideas not yet established get formed and influenced, than on the (im)permeability of established opinions. In the context so far described it is worth investigating how significant is the role that influencers play in young people’s opinion-formation dynamics. Indeed, nowadays many influencers disseminate contents of high societal relevance, through which they take positions on politically relevant topics, thus influencing public agenda and opinions (Suuronen et al., 2021). Political communication studies have focused mainly on how influencers have inspired political leaders (Casero-Ripollés, 2020). It seems then necessary to focus more deeply on the impact that influencers exert with respect to young people's opinions’ development, to identify potentially relevant consequences in an under-explored area, and to look at the participation and political interest of young citizens from a new perspective. Indeed, young citizens are part of a world that witnesses the ideological deconstruction of the political system, in which they struggle to find real representation. They tend to reject the use of more traditional forms of participation and to express their political engagement in new ways (Bakker & De Vreese, 2011; Bennett, 2012). Non-institutionalized forms of political participation seem to arise in response to situations of discomfort and dissatisfaction with the system. It is from this very condition, however, that derives an increased willingness to take on political responsibility (Ceccarini, 2015). As a consequence, one of the main purposes of this paper proposal is to examine, through a qualitative content analysis of interview data, the new ways in which young people manifest their political participation, facing the hypothesis which sees the new generations as mostly disinterested in politics. Rethinking the notion of participation, investigating the meaning that young people attach to the online actions they take on a daily basis (“(news)sharing”, “reacting”, etc.), and those to which they are exposed (peer to peer persuasion, influencers’ stances), could help confuting the hypothesis of young people's disinterest in politics and contribute to the awareness of a lively and participatory democracy (Theocharis et al., 2019). The second issue that this paper aims to investigate is the role of social media and digital influencers in opinion- formation dynamics among young people and their ability to serve as a vehicle for raising interest in issues of societal concern. As far as expectations are concerned, I expect to find positive evidence from young people being involved in politics in a non-traditional way. At the same time, I also expect to find a positive correlation between social media (and influencers' stances) exposure and interest in social and political issues. The specific focus of my research will be on young Italian citizens (born 1998-2006), who received their political socialization during the ‘10s (crisis, “post-Berlusconism” and technical governments, populist complete affirmation). With respect to the methods, I plan to conduct exploratory interviews with young people, investigating their perceptions of political participation and engagement, the significance they attach to online behaviours ("(news) sharing", “reacting”, etc.), the role that social networks play in their political information, and the way they use social platforms in relation to social and political issues. Interviews data will be analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Alongside this, I will focus on social network data (Instagram and Facebook). I intend to compile a list of influencers (individuals/media/pages), selected according to engagement metrics, analysing their communicative styles and the types of reactions elicited in young users, mainly through text analysis of posts’ descriptions and comments. I plan to focus on influencers' perspective, specifically analyzing the political content they produce, in order to understand possible reasons behind their stances and behaviours, thus not only considering them as a vehicle through which politics manifests itself, but trying to better grasp their communicative intentions and specificities. I intend to track the posts, select those better performing in terms of engagement metrics and/or political content, and investigate how often and in which ways they deal with political issues, reviewing the content posted, the interactions elicited, and the consequences brought to the public agenda. An in-depth analysis of previously collected data (Post-Gen project and the Itanes research program) will integrate the techniques used to achieve the research objectives.