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This article develops a reputational theory of political falsehoods. Politicians are motivated by the desire to build a positive reputation, therefore, they will be more likely to deliver false statements (incurring the risk of being fact-checked) when the potential benefit outweighs the cost. This happens as new elections come closer, since the electoral benefit of falsehoods increases along with the probability of being checked too late (after the election day). Politicians are less likely to issue falsehoods in detailed statements and in scripted communication, since the reputational cost is higher because such falsehoods would be considered intentional. Conversely, the stronger trust that voters attribute to politicians on issues they own, allows politicians to lie on such topics. Statistical analysis of almost 8000 statements released by politicians and assessed by fact-checkers, in the United States and Italy (2007–2018), supports the hypotheses. The results hold irrespective of party affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of corruption charges on the electoral performance of parties is conditioned by specific institutional factors. This article shows the extent to which the effects of political corruption depend on the control that party leaders exercise over the ballot. It is argued that voters might abstain or support other lists if they cannot select individual candidates to revitalize the reputation of the political party. Employing data on judicial investigations in Italy from 1983 to 2013, we provide evidence of the role of electoral rules and intra-party xcandidate selection in shaping the relationship between corruption and voters’ behaviour. Parties implicated in corruption or related crimes experience a loss of votes when they compete under a closed list formula or when the candidate selection process is strongly centralized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Going beyond source and content pluralism, we propose a two-dimensional audience-based measure of perceived pluralism by exploiting the practice of "social TV". For this purpose, 135,228 tweets related to 30 episodes of prime time political talk shows broadcast in Italy in 2014 have been analyzed through supervised sentiment analysis. The findings suggest that the two main TV networks compete by addressing generalist audiences. The public television offers a plural set of talk shows but ignores the anti-political audience. The ideological background of the anchorman shapes the audience's perception, while the gender of the guests does not seem to matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates party-union relationships in Italy (1946–2014) by hand-coding parties’ parliamentary speeches and trade unions’ congress motions. In line with the cartel party thesis, a time series analysis shows that the ideological closeness between the left-wing Italian General Confederation of Labour and left-wing parties deteriorated when the Italian Socialist Party (1980) and the heirs of the Italian Communist Party (1998) converged toward the centre of the ideological spectrum. Conversely, the closeness between the Catholic-inspired Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions and the heirs of Christian Democracy increased after 1994, when the former party’s leftist factions became the major part of the Italian Popular Party. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Judicial investigations into politicians are a fundamental component of politics, with these investigations often leading to public scandals. Yet, empirical evidence of the strategic determinants of judicial investigations is intrinsically hard to gather, a problem that has significantly limited the study of this important phenomenon. This paper studies the politics behind judicial investigations by leveraging new data on prosecutors' informants in 1125 episodes of misbehavior of Italian MPs involved in different crimes (1983–2019). Results provide evidence in favor of a political use of denunciations for corruption crimes: when a party weakens, the likelihood that political enemies denounce past misbehavior of members of the weakened party increases, suggesting that the political use of denunciation is elastic to changes in the electoral performance. Furthermore, weakened MPs are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the argument that accusations are politically motivated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how factional conflict and intra-party organization affect a party’s likelihood of being involved in a ruling coalition. We focus on Italian parties (between 1946 and 2013) estimating their internal heterogeneity through quantitative text analysis of policy documents presented by factions during party congresses. The impact of inter-factional conflict has been investigated in interaction with intra-party rules showing that when the party leader is autonomous and can rely on powerful whipping resources to impose discipline, the party will credibly sticks to the coalition agreement, thereby reducing the negative effect of factional heterogeneity in coalition bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of social network sites reopened the debate on the ability of traditional media to influence public opinion and act as an agenda setter. To answer this question, the present paper investigates first-level and second-level agenda-setting effects in the online environment by focusing on two heated Italian political debates (the reform of public funding of parties and the debate over austerity). By employing innovative and efficient statistical methods such as the lead–lag analysis and supervised sentiment analysis, we compare the attention devoted to each issue and the content spread by online news media and Twitter users. Our results show that online media keep their first-level agenda-setting power even though we find a marked difference between the slant of online news and the Twitter sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changes in political language that occurred after 1989 in Italy and focuses on textual documents drafted by intra-party subgroups between 1946 and 2010 that were related to the internal debates of Italian political parties. These documents, which are addressed to party members and activists rather than the wider public, have been analyzed through quantitative text analysis of word frequencies. The results confirm that a few relevant changes occurred that involve the lexicon, tone, and content of messages. However, concepts such as left and right are still relevant, and we observed neither a strong decline in the use of ideological terms nor a wider usage of populist words. Despite the growing personalization of politics, the main political leaders are not frequently mentioned, with two exceptions: Prodi and Berlusconi. Overall, there is a distance between intra-party politics and the logic of entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between Internet usage and political trust? To answer this question, we performed a cross-sectional analysis of Eurobarometer survey data related to 27 countries and a supervised sentiment analysis of online political information broadcast during the Italian debate on the reform of public funding of parties. The results disclose the differences between Web 1.0 websites and Web 2.0 social media, showing that consumption of news from information/news websites is positively associated with higher trust, while access to information available on social media is linked with lower trust. This has implications for the debate on social media as a public sphere and for the tension between professional and citizen journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increasing attention in the literature on the possibility of analyzing social media as a useful complement to traditional off-line polls to monitor an electoral campaign. Some scholars claim that by doing so, we can also produce a forecast of the result. Relying on a proper methodology for sentiment analysis remains a crucial issue in this respect. In this work, we apply the supervised method proposed by Hopkins and King to analyze the voting intention of Twitter users in the United States (for the 2012 Presidential election) and Italy (for the two rounds of the centre-left 2012 primaries). This methodology presents two crucial advantages compared to traditionally employed alternatives: a better interpretation of the texts and more reliable aggregate results. Our analysis shows a remarkable ability of Twitter to “nowcast” as well as to forecast electoral results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates intra-party politics and explores the determinants of factional breakaways, going beyond the unitary actor assumption. It presents a game-theoretic model that focuses on intra-party competition and bargaining dynamics to analyse the interplay between party leaders and minority factions. It tests several hypotheses based on the formal model using a new dataset that contains information about the strength and policy positions of factions inside Italian parties, from 1946 to 2011, measured through quantitative content analysis of motions presented during party congresses. The results show that office, policy and electoral motives influence factions’ decisions to break away. Other elements – such as intra-party democracy, the electoral system and party system competitiveness – also affect leaders’ attitudes toward compromising and alter the likelihood of a split. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the dynamics of portfolio allocation within political parties to shed light on the patterns of conflict and cooperation between rival party factions. It provides a game-theoretic model that helps in explaining differences in portfolio allocation due to alternative modes of party organisation or party system competitiveness. Focusing on party congresses to estimate the number, strength and policy positions of party factions, the Italian case is analysed by testing some hypotheses generated by the theoretical model. The results shown that, overall, spoils are shared in proportion to the strength of each faction, in line with the prediction of Gamson's Law. However, there are also some important deviations from this path. Rules that foster party leaders' autonomy in fact provide them with a higher degree of discretion that will be used to reward their followers and to ward off any credible and harmful threat to party unity. Indeed, strategic portfolio allocation might balance out a lower amount of policy payoffs and becomes a strategy to restrain minorities from breaking away, thus contributing to the preservation of party unity in highly competitive political systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As long as parties are interested in policies, they will always have incentives for influencing the cabinet bargaining process, although they do not necessarily shape its outcome to the same extent. Being a member of the invested government, for example, should increase the leverage a party enjoys when bargaining over the cabinet programme. Nevertheless, depending on institutional and political conditions, non-cabinet parties may also play a role in affecting cabinet policy positions. Despite being widely recognised in the theoretical literature, this point has received considerably less attention in empirical studies. By focusing on cabinet bargaining outcomes during the First Italian Republic, the article shows that spatial advantages associated with parliamentary dynamics, including those possessed by non-cabinet parties, can be no less significant in capturing policy payoffs than government membership, even after controlling for other relevant institutional and behavioural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This work investigates the process of position-taking, focussing on the factional bargaining within the party. Exploiting two recently built datasets that estimated the policy positions of Italian parties and factions from 1946 to 2010, we investigate if and to what extent factions bind the party leader in choosing the platform. We find confirmation for the idea that party positions are linked to factional preferences. Overall, the party works as a ‘bounded oligarchy’. Furthermore, the electoral payoff of party unity increases the impact of factional constraints when general elections approach. In line with the cartel party theory, however, autonomous leaders who are directly elected by a wider selectorate can get rid of factional ties choosing more moderate and vote-maximizing platforms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Literature on party factions has investigated the elements that affect factionalism, and particularly the elements that affect the number of factions. Scholars raised a set of hypotheses that have never been systematically tested. Building on those hypotheses the present work analyzes the determinants of the number of factions within Italian parties from 1946 to 2010. Thanks to a new dataset that allows the estimation of policy positions of factions through a quantitative text analysis of motions presented during party congresses, this paper investigates the effects of intra-party polarization as well as the impact of internal rules and the characteristics of party system. The results show that proportional intra-party rules, availability of resources and internal polarization increase the degree of factionalism. Moreover open-list electoral systems contribute to increase the number of factions but only among parliamentary parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]