Define the populist political communication style: the case of Italian political leaders on Twitter

ABSTRACT

In the hybrid media system, many processes are reforming political communication: popularisation, disintermediation, personalisation, intimisation and of course populism. This study proposes an empirical definition of political communication style with the aim of identifying characteristics of the populist political communication style. Between 2015 and 2016, the Twitter timelines of the main political leaders in Italy were analysed for 16 months. Applying an MCA allowed us to identify two key factors that characterise the communication styles of leaders: (1) communication mode, comparing negative and positive; and (2) communicative focus, comparing personalisation and political/campaign. The intersection of these two factors resulted in four different political communication styles: ‘Engaging’, ‘Intimate’, ‘Champion of the people’ and ‘Man of the street’. The latter two were clearly characterised by the presence of populist ideology fragments and traits, but were not strictly related to the leaders’ ideological positions. This result supports the hypothesis that populist style is less and less connected to the right/left political cleavage, but rather the result of a varied combination of gradations that mix different individual aspects of the leader’s political communication style.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• political communication style
• Twitter
• political leaders
• popularisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Roberta Bracciale, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Sociology of new media at the Political Science Department of University of Pisa, Italy. She is a founder of the MediaLab, Big Data in Social and Political Research Laboratory. Her current research interests focus on the social impact of digital media, with particular attention to the field of Political Communication; to methodological perspectives related to media studies; and to issues related to digital inequalities in everyday life [email: [email protected]].

Antonio Martella is a PhD student in Political Communication at the Political Science Department of the University of Pisa, Italy. He is a member of the MediaLab, Big Data in Social and Political Research Laboratory. He has earned a postgraduate master in Big Data & Social Mining at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. His research interests focus on populism, political leaders communication and social media [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Roberta Bracciale http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7567-4785

Antonio Martella http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3378-1782

Notes

1. The coefficients of Krippendorff's α for the groups were highly satisfying in terms of almost all variables (Krippendorff's α> 0.83) by conventions established in the field (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007).

2. Italian Constitution, art. 68, “Without authorization from the House to which they belong, no member of Parliament may be submitted to personal or home search, nor may they be arrested or otherwise deprived of personal freedom”.

3. Renzi's tweet example seems to embody a secondary meaning: Italians’ revanche against the French and German heads of the states. This example could help to clarify the importance of the stage crafting that, even with popularizstion elements, allows to send a populist-like massage without any explicit reference to populist ideology.