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Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament campaign, we investigate parties’ engagement in negative campaigning on Facebook and the relationship to a parties’ ideology and their status as governing versus opposition party at the national level. Manual coding of 8,153 Facebook posts of parties from twelve European countries shows parties create less negative posts than positive and neutral ones. However, these negative posts attract more shares than positive, neutral, and balanced statements, which increases their prominence on the platform. Hence, users and algorithms create a negative campaign environment on Facebook to a greater extent than parties.

On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political contents citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors' Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visibility. This study introduces the concept of self-centered social media communication style which focuses on 'salient' and 'owned' issues with populist and negative appeals and investigates how user engagement is related to its main elements. We also explore how users' receptivity to these content-related factors is shaped by country context. More specifically, we hypothesize that users are more likely to react, comment on and share posts focusing on salient topics or issues 'owned' by parties rather than more permanent policy issues, and posts including populist appeals and negativity. Further, we test how these effects are moderated by geographical regions and the level of party system polarization. We manually coded 9,703 Facebook posts of 68 parties from 12 European countries in the context of the 2019 European elections. Our findings show that users are more likely to engage with immigration-related, domestic, populist and negative posts, but react less to posts dealing with environmental or economic issues. While issue ownership does not play a significant role for user engagement, country context plays a minor role. However, some populist appeals are more effective in more polarized countries.

What are the effects of party defections on the attitudes of politicians who remain loyal to the party? We answer by combining multiple sources of data into a comprehensive novel data set on parliamentary party switching, to estimate how this affects the perceived distance between a politician and his party. Focusing on the theory of cognitive dissonance and the black sheep effect, we hypothesize that politicians perceive themselves closer to their parties when those parties recently suffered defections. The effect should be greater among incumbent politicians as they directly experience divisions, but also among officials dissatisfied with the leadership as their dissonance should be stronger. Statistical analyses of data from two elite surveys, on a sample of 13,256 politicians belonging to 92 parties that ran in 28 elections held between 2005 and 2015 in 14 countries, provide support for our hypotheses and shed light on the consequences of intra-party defections.

Political economy suggests that media owners try to influence the process of media production by providing career incentives to like-minded journalists and adjusting the level of professional autonomy granted to them. Accordingly, we analyze whether the political distance between editors and journalists (i.e., reporters) affects the careers of journalists in terms of rank and salary, as well as their perceived professional autonomy. We hypothesize that editors reward and allow freedom to journalists whose political viewpoints coincide more precisely with their own. Political proximity to editors should lead to a better salary and rank for reporters and to a stronger perception of editorial autonomy among reporters. We tested our hypotheses through statistical analysis using data from the Worlds of Journalism Study. We analyzed the answers of 3,087 journalists interviewed between 2012 and 2016 in six European countries: Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The results support our hypotheses. The analysis reveals a polarization of media outlet editors, and robust results were achieved via a measure of political proximity that takes into account the particular influence of left-leaning and right-leaning editors. Such partisan leaning, however, seems less relevant in countries belonging to Hallin and Mancini’s Atlantic model.

This article analyzes 3 months of online debate during the electoral campaign for the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Through supervised sentiment analysis, we assess the extent of support for the referendum within the general public of Twitter users ( Twittersphere) by analyzing the voting intentions expressed online in 2,369,333 tweets. Similarly, we exploit the practice of social TV and investigate the support for the referendum expressed by the 160,465 tweets posted by second screeners, that is, the subsample of Twitter users who watched and actively commented on nine political talk shows during the campaign. We compare the mentions and the attitudes of the Twittersphere and the second screeners by means of a lead–lag analysis to test whether the second screeners can act as influencers and trendsetters able to shape or anticipate attention and opinions toward an issue within larger audiences. The results reveal an inverse relationship between the Twittersphere and the second screeners whereby the reactions of the latter diverge from those of the general Twitter public. This finding has implications for the literature on echo chambers and the polarization of social media.

Intra-party groups influence parties’ policy priorities. However, scholars have yet to map the pathways with the greatest impact. We argue that party congresses serve as venues for decision-making, allowing speeches and motions to support differing priorities. Considering parties’ internal process, we propose that deliberations and alternate motions independently affect resulting policy statements. We examine this perspective focusing on meetings of the French Socialist Party. We use Structural Topic Models to analyze the issues included in 74 motions, 1439 speeches, and 9 manifestos from congresses held between 1969 and 2015 to evaluate whether factional motions or individual speeches better reflect the content of manifestos and to assess the internal agenda-setting process. Results suggest that motions better predict the content of parties’ manifestos. However, when focusing solely on majority faction, we find that both motions and speeches predict manifestos’ contents. This supports a theory of intra-party decision-making and factional dominance.

The article sheds light on two missing links in the existing literature on government’s policy preferences and policy choices, namely the roles played by party factions and trade unions as political actors able to affect government’s decision-making power. The content analysis of a wide typology of documents (i.e., investiture speeches, parliamentary debates, motions discussed during parties’ and trade unions’ congresses) allows to locate cabinets, parties, party factions and trade unions on a common pro-state/pro-market scale. Using these new data sources, we perform a multivariate time-series analysis to estimate the relative impact of those political actors on social expenditure in Italy throughout its modern history (1946–2015). The results support the idea that intra-party dynamics and trade unions’ preferences do matter. Indeed, government’s ability to retrench the welfare state vanishes when the Prime Minister’s party is highly polarized internally and when trade unions are more cohesive.

First published online: 04 November 2020 This analysis of issue emphasis on Twitter by the seven main German parties during the 2017 federal election campaign underlines the importance of taking a time-sensitive approach when investigating issue competition. We show that the attention parties give to issues they are associated with fluctuates frequently on social media and alternates with other thematic priorities that may not be 'owned'. In the digital age, therefore, established theories of issue ownership come under pressure. Our findings reveal that short-term issue emphasis is driven by exogenous shocks and spatial considerations. The exact mechanism behind parties' decisions to emphasise a specific issue in the short run depends on the type of issue in focus. Communication on economic left-right and socio-cultural issues is shaped by different strategies. Our study reveals that when studying issue competition online different policy dimensions need to be distinguished just as the temporal dynamics need to be understood. This needs to be done instead of aggregating data to give a holistic account.

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.

The 2019 European election in Italy had a distinctive national impact, given the pivotal role played by Matteo Salvini’s League, back then in government with the Five Star Movement (M5S). Both parties campaigned to highlight their influence on core issues within the government coalition. The League dominated the online campaign producing an outstanding number of Facebook posts (3,231) and reporting great levels of engagement (second only to the M5S). The ‘titanic’ success obtained by the League in the polls prompted a political crisis, which led to a new government coalition between the M5S and the centre-left Democratic Party.

Judicial investigations of politicians are a fundamental component of politics, often leading to 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 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. The timing of past misbehavior is crucial: members of weakened parties are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the conjecture that accusations are politically motivated.

Scholars argued that anti-establishment parties use a populist rhetoric that appeals to the worst instincts of people. Indeed, populist politicians are often viewed as charismatic leaders that have fire in their belly. While in the past these parties heavily relied on anti-establishment platforms and communication rhetoric, their increasing electoral success along with the growing duties linked with government membership transform them into more established parties, rather than pure outsiders, and cast doubts on the feasibility of keeping a populist rhetoric. This paper compares right-wing and non-right-wing populism, investigating whether populist leaders change their rhetorical strategy once in office, decreasing the level of negativity and adopting a more forward-looking and inclusive style of communication, with a stronger focus on fulfilling the policy proposal made during the electoral campaign rather than blaming political rivals. For this purpose, we collected a new corpus of political speeches extracted from video messages posted on Facebook by four anti-establishment party leaders in three countries (Austria, Italy and Spain), from 2016 to 2018, i.e., immediately before and immediately after their access to power. Overall, 30 h of recorded audio from 215 videos (amounting to around 140 million visualizations) have been analyzed using topic models and well-established semantic psycholinguistic dictionaries. The results highlight slight changes in the rhetoric of populist leaders once in power, mostly for non-right-wing populists, as their language becomes less negative, less assertive and more focused on government duties.

Does the interaction with the opinions of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ affect the behavior of politicians? So far, little attention has been devoted to the effect of social networking sites (SNS) on ‘hard politics’ choices. Focusing on two case studies related to Italian politics, namely the debate on the civil unions bill and the ‘Fertility Day’ crisis, in 2016, this paper tries to fill this gap assessing the influence of SNS on the behavior of politicians. For this purpose, supervised aggregated sentiment analysis and time series analysis are used to evaluate whether politicians surrender to the pressure put on them by their followers. The findings highlight some positive effects in terms of accountability/transparency, though in terms of responsiveness politics seems to continue as usual, and the road toward a full ‘sentiment democracy’ is still far ahead.

Why does the government appeal for concertation? Starting from the principal‒agent framework and delegation theory, the article argues that the government is more willing to share decision-making power with trade unions when the policy preferences endorsed by the unions are closer to those of the cabinet. Furthermore, it maintains that government propensity to negotiate with trade unions increases as the heterogeneity of union policy preferences grows because the cabinet can exploit its agenda-setting power to divide the union front. The article tests these two hypotheses through a longitudinal analysis of the Italian case (1946–2014). In detail, it takes advantage of two original datasets built through content analysis that provide unique in-depth information on the policy preferences of parties and cabinets and measures the policy positions of the main Italian trade unions, thus allowing assessment of their reciprocal heterogeneity. The results confirm the expectations.

The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics. The authors use comparative data on portfolio design reforms in nine Western European countries since the 1970s to demonstrate how the design of government portfolios changes over time. Specifically, they show that portfolios are changed frequently (on average about once a year) and that such shifts are more likely after changes in the prime ministership or the party composition of the government. These findings suggest a political logic behind these reforms based on the preferences and power of political parties and politicians. They have major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics.

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.

We present iSA (integrated sentiment analysis), a novel algorithm designed for social networks and Web 2.0 sphere (Twitter, blogs, etc.) opinion analysis, i.e. developed for the digital environments characterized by abundance of noise compared to the amount of information. Instead of performing an individual classification and then aggregate the predicted values, iSA directly estimates the aggregated distribution of opinions. Based on supervised hand-coding rather than NLP techniques or ontological dictionaries, iSA is a language-agnostic algorithm (based on human coders’ abilities). iSA exploits a dimensionality reduction approach which makes it scalable, fast, memory efficient, stable and statistically accurate. The cross-tabulation of opinions is possible with iSA thanks to its stability. Through empirical analysis it will be shown when iSA outperforms machine learning techniques of individual classification (e.g. SVM, Random Forests, etc) as well as the only other alternative for aggregated sentiment analysis known as ReadMe.

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.

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.

Motivated by the literature on ‘competing principals’, this article studies the effect of interactive social networking sites on the behavior of politicians. For this purpose, 12,455 comments posted on the Facebook walls of 423 Italian MPs have been analyzed to assess whether Facebook played a role in the selection of the Italian Head of State in 2013, enhancing responsiveness. The statistical analysis reveals that the pressure exerted through social media did not affect MPs’ propensity to express public dissent over the party line, which is instead affected by more traditional ‘principals’ and factors: seniority, primary elections, and factional membership.

This article addresses the potential role played by social media analysis in promoting interaction between politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. We show that in a “Big Data” world, the comments posted online by social media users can profitably be used to extract meaningful information, which can support the action of policymakers along the policy cycle. We analyze Twitter data through the technique of Supervised Aggregated Sentiment Analysis. We develop two case studies related to the “jobs act” labor market reform and the “#labuonascuola” school reform, both formulated and implemented by the Italian Renzi cabinet in 2014–15. Our results demonstrate that social media data can help policymakers to rate the available policy alternatives according to citizens' preferences during the formulation phase of a public policy; can help them to monitor citizens' opinions during the implementation phase; and capture stakeholders' mobilization and de-mobilization processes. We argue that, although social media analysis cannot replace other research methods, it provides a fast and cheap stream of information that can supplement traditional analyses, enhancing responsiveness and institutional learning.