Resisting right-wing populism in power: a comparative analysis of the Facebook activities of social movements in Italy and the UK

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to present a comparative study of the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in power through social media, by looking at cases in Italy and the United Kingdom. The research question is how social movements are implementing a process of reactive political identity construction – i.e. political identification – and a political counter-strategy by opposing right-wing populism in power through their Facebook official accounts. It implements a mixed-method research design with in-depth semi-structured interviews and a two-step quantitative text analysis based on Topic Model and Dictionary Method.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• social media
• right-wing populism
• text-as-data
• mixed methods

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicolò Pennucci

Nicolò Pennucci is a PhD candidate in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence (Italy). He works on civil society reaction to right-wing populism in the UK, Italy and the United States. He employs mixed method combining qualitative interviews and computational methods.