Electoral Campaigning 2.0—The Case of Italian Regional Elections

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the use of social media by the 53 candidates for governor at the last Italian regional elections in April 2010 and further explores the two hypotheses on the role of online technologies for political parties—the “politics as usual” and the “equalization” hypotheses—which begin from two different points of view: first, regional elections, and second, the candidate's appropriation, negotiation, or resistance to the convergence and participatory culture distinctive of the contemporary media ecology. The aim of this article is to address the following research questions: (a) Which are the different degrees of appropriation of convergence and participatory culture among Italian candidates during the 2010 regional elections according to political parties' dimension in terms of members, voters and resources?; and (b) Are different degrees of appropriation of convergence and participatory culture positively associated with political parties dimensions?

Keywords:

• Convergence culture
• online campaigning
• participation
• social media
• Web 2.0

Acknowledgments

The work presented here is part of a larger work on Italian local and national elections conducted by the group “Online Politics and New Media” based at Istituto Cattaneo (http://www.cattaneo.org/en/ricerche-menu/politica-menu/politica-online-e-nuovi-media.html) and coordinated by Lorenzo Mosca. The dataset will be embargoed until the end of the project, but the codebook and other information on the research project are available under request.

Notes

The present paper has been discussed and written collaboratively and equally by the two authors. Accordingly, the attribution of single parts to different authors, which represents an Italian academic habit, is not deemed relevant nor fair.

1. The use of the Web by political actors especially in election campaigns has grown since the end of the 1990s in the U.S. and then in Europe. For the role of the Internet in the U.S. campaigns, see, among others, Bimber and Davies (2003). The evolution of online political communication in the Italian context is well described in Bentivegna (2006). For the role of the Web in recent Italian election campaigns see also Vaccari (2006, 2009).

2. A survey on Italians' news consumption practices in October 2009 (Ceccarini & Di Pierdomenico, 2009) shows that 86.7% of the population gets its news from TV daily; radio is the second most common news media (40.5%), followed by the Internet (38.2%) whose use exceeds press readership (33.1%). The percentage of those who keep up with the news online on a daily basis increases among people aged 15–24 (74.2%) and those aged 25–34 (62.4%). This doesn't mean, however, that young people are less exposed to TV news, in so far as news consumption seems to be rather cumulative and multimedia: 73.8% of people aged 15–24 years old and 81.2% of those aged 25–34 access news on TV.

3. Source: Facebook Ads elaborated by http://www.vincos.it.

4. We did not consider Twitter, because in 2010, it was not popular among Italian Internet users. Only 1,300,000 Italians had a Twitter profile in October 2010 (http://www.vincos.it).

5. As anticipated, Facebook was the most popular social network site in Italy at the time of our fieldwork, and the most widely used by politicians themselves.

6. Though we do not dismiss the importance of multimodality in the online environment, this type of investigation exceeded the scope of the research.

7. We decided that the presence of one link between two platforms was sufficient to measure the minimal level of integration with regard to links among online tools. Our aim was, indeed, to identify broad typologies of Web 2.0 use in order to distinguish among candidates reporting similar scores regarding their online presence. As explained above, our study was exploratory, and the scale adopted here can be further tested and developed in future studies.

8. The political parties were Forza Nuova in Tuscany and Lombardy, and Partito Nasional Veneto and Veneti Indipendensa in Veneto.

9. The name of the candidate was Agazio Loiero.

10. Puglia is a sourthern region of Italy. Movimento io Sud is a small independent political party present in Southern Italian regions. The name of the candidate was Adriana Poli Bortone.

11. Partito per l'Alternativa Comunista is a small, radical, left-wing political party. The name of the candidate was Michele Rizzi.

12. Piemonte is a northwestern region of Italy. The name of the candidate was Roberto Cota.

13. Tuscany is a central region of Italy. The name of the candidate was Monica Faenzi.

14. Campania is a southern region of Italy. The name of the candidate was Stefano Caldoro.

15. Lombardy is a northern region of Italy. The name of the candidate was Roberto Formigoni.

16. Veneto is a northeastern region of Italy. The name of the candidate was Luca Zaia.

17. The name of the candidate was Enrico Rossi.

18. The name of the candidate was Nichi Vendola.

19. This could be also due to the fact that the candidate expressed his willingness to be one of the competitors in the forthcoming primaries of the national center-left coalition.

20. Emilia Romagna is a central region of Italy. The name of the candidate was Anna Maria Bernini.

21. Marche is a central region of Italy. The name of the candidate was Erminio Marinelli.

22. Lazio is a central region in Italy/. The name of the candidate was Emma Bonino.

23. The political movement originated by Grillo's Meetup.

24. They are Emma Bonino (center-left, Lazio), Luca Zaia (center-right, Veneto), Mercedes Bresso (center-left, Piemonte), Roberto Formigoni (center-right, Lombardia), and Stefano Caldoro (center-right, Campania). Mercedes Bresso represents an interesting example: while the communication on her Facebook profile was strongly integrated with Web site updates and professionally managed, she personally updated her Twitter statuses.

25. The name of the candidate was Davide Bono.

26. The name of the candidate was Nichi Vendola.

27. The name of the candidate was Emma Bonino.