Enemies and friends. The instrumental social construction of populist identity through twitter in Italy at the time of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Based on 2020 Twitter data, this article studies the social construction of populist identity in Italy. Starting from Tajfel's social identity theory (1978), the research aims at dissecting the elements at the basis of the populist identity construction process. The analysis focuses on both quantitative analysis and qualitative inspection of the tweets of four populist leaders, namely Salvini (LN), Meloni (FDI), Berlusconi (FI), and Di Maio (M5S). Results highlight the outgroup's position and its functional role in strengthening relative deprivation to facilitate ingroup identification. In addition, the populist social identity is built on group membership and the biased comparison between the ingroup and one or more outgroups. Results demonstrate how leaders’ strategies change based on being in government or not and according to their position on the left-right axis. In this context, the pandemic offered a further political opportunity, especially to those who have found themselves in government.

KEYWORDS:

• Political sociology
• populist identity
• political communication
• social media
• Italy
• qualitative and quantitative analysis of texts
• twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The parties were chosen based on the work of Rooduijn et al. (2019).

2 In the words of Mouffe (2018), the difficulty of classifying M5S also derives from the different way – outside the right versus left frontier – around which the speeches about people are built.

3 See Agcom (2021). Osservatorio sulle comunicazioni. n. 2/2021, and https://www.agcom.it/.https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-italy, accessed December 2021.

4 MES (in English ESM) is “an intergovernmental organisation established by (EU) member states in 2012. Its mission is to enable the countries of the euro area to avoid and overcome financial crises and to maintain long-term financial stability and prosperity.” (https://www.esm.europa.eu/about-us#headline-who_we_are).

5 See https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20_agosto_16/locatelli-cts-la-scuola-riaprira-tutti-costi-l-epidemia-si-puo-contenere-6fab0e60-dfe6-11ea-b249-6fbea5975045.shtml.