The 2018 Italian election campaign viewed from Twitter

Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini at an electoral meeting of the centre-right coalition at the Adriano's Temple in Rome, Italy, on 1st March 2018. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.Italians go to the polls on March 4, and no one
knows what will happen next. Observers and commentators agree that the election
outcome is far from clear and that the latest polls are inconclusive. Voters
are polarised over divisive issues such as taxes, the EU and immigration, and
the electorate is roughly divided into three factions, each with about a third
of the vote.

The outgoing center-left Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD), led by former
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, has seen his support decline in the last year to
about 23%. To the left of the democrats, the Free and Equal Party (Liberi e Uguali, LeU) – recently founded
by PD defectors – is more a competitor than an ally. The center-right bloc is
leading the polls at 35%: nonetheless, the coalition itself is divided roughly
in half between center-right Forza Italia
(FI), led by former prime
minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, and the far-right anti-immigrant League (Lega) championed by the outspoken eurosceptic leader Matteo
Salvini.

The anti-establishment 5Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, M5S) looks set to
become Italy’s biggest single party (although behind the center-right
coalition), but its leader Luigi Di Maio has generally stated that they don’t
want to join other forces in an attempt to form a government.

Making matters worse, a record-high proportion
of undecided voters adds to a new and untested electoral law, that allocates
one third of the seats in a first-past-the-post system.

In the run-up to the polls, at EuVisions we have
followed the Twitter side of the Italian electoral campaign, monitoring the
online activity involving the six main parties: Free and Equal, the
Democratic Party, Berlusconi’s Forza
Italia, national conservative Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FdI), the League and the Five Star Movement.

Overall, we have been able to follow 1,579
candidates of these parties and to track their Twitter conversations for two
weeks now. Also, we collected citizens’ reactions (in the form of retweets and
replies) to candidates’ tweets, amounting to roughly 400,000 tweets.

Who tweets the
most?

A quick glance at candidates’ activity provides
an overview of the forces at play in the campaign. The outgoing Democratic
Party holds the largest presence on Twitter in terms of ‘active’ candidates:
305 PD candidates took to Twitter over recent days, compared to 170 candidates
for the Five Star Movement, 152 for Forza Italia, and 148, 88 and 79 for –
respectively – Free and Equal, the League, and Brothers of Italy.

In light of these numbers, it is somewhat unsurprising
to discover that the Democratic Party, overall, tweeted more than other parties
(10,370 tweets, with an average of 940 tweets per day). However, the higher
proportion of Democratic candidates seems to reflect a more organized and well
established party structure as well as higher ‘political seniority’ of the candidates,
rather than a heavier investment in the potential benefits of online
campaigning. If we look at candidates’ activity on average, in fact, it turns
out that the League features the most prolific candidates – every candidate
writes on average 4.7 tweets per day – followed closely by Forza Italia (4.1),
Free and Equal (3.9) and 5 Star (3.1). Despite being more present on Twitter,
the Democrats rank near the bottom (3 tweets per candidate per day).

Figure 1 Average number of tweets/day sent by each candidate

Who gets
retweeted the most?

Taken together, all tweets sent by the candidates
amount to about 35 thousand. These numbers though are only the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to online conversations about the election campaign. The larger
part of the over 400 thousands tweets we collected is made up of reactions to
the candidates’ tweets sent by citizens who took to Twitter in the run-up to
interact with politicians and participate in the campaign.

Looking at citizens’ reactions, it emerges that
candidates from the anti-immigration League and from the anti-establishment
5Star are by far the most capable of engaging their respective electoral bases,
which seem more motivated in spreading party content. On average, tweets from
the League are retweeted 13 times, and those from M5S 10.8 times; whereas
messages from other parties lag behind in terms of resonance. As we discuss in
the conclusion, such a result seems to confirm that populist forces outperform
traditional parties in engaging with their base on Twitter.

Figure 2. Average number of retweets per tweet sent by candidates

Personalization
and negative campaigning: a look at candidates’ communication strategies

Since the rise of social media, political
communication has been increasingly preoccupied by two parallel phenomena: an
increase in the level of personalization of electoral campaigns – with a
greater centrality accorded to the image of the leader – and a widespread use
of strategies based on negative campaigning.

To better understand the role played by these
two dynamics in the Italian campaign, we have analysed the content of
candidates’ tweets to measure the attention dedicated by each party (a) to its
leader (personalization) and (b) to other
parties’ leaders (negative campaigning).
The results are presented in Figure 3 and 4.

Personalization

As Figure 3 and 4 show, parties make a different
use of strategies of personalization and negative campaigning. Starting with personalization,
the party which focuses most on the image of its leader is the right-wing
League: Matteo Salvini is in fact mentioned in 16% of the tweets sent by his
party’s candidates.  

Figure 3. Party leaders’ centrality in candidates’ tweets.

Such a tendency towards personalization is
shared by the other Italian right-wing parties as well: Forza Italia and
Brothers of Italy’s candidates dedicate both a significant amount of tweets to their
leaders – respectively, Silvio Berlusconi (11.3%) and Giorgia Meloni (8.5%).
Interestingly enough, this is also true for the left-wing Free and Equal, who
mention party leader Pietro Grasso in 7.4 tweets out of 100. By contrast, a
lower attention is dedicated by their fellow candidates to Luigi Di Maio (3.7%)
and Matteo Renzi (3.4%).

Negative campaigning

Finally, Figure 4 presents interesting data on the
main targets of the negative campaigning strategies carried out by the
candidates of each party.

Figure
4. Main targets of negative campaigning.

As we can see, the 5Star Movement leader Luigi
Di Maio is the main bullseye in the conversations of candidates from Forza
Italia (2%), Brothers of Italy (2.1%) and the Democratic Party (2.4%).
Meanwhile, Democrats leader Matteo Renzi is the main target of the negative
campaign carried out by the League (2%), the 5Star Movement (4.1%) and Free and
Equal (2.1%).

Ultimately, the party which uses negative
campaigning the most is the 5Star Movement: not only do 5Star candidates use
more than 10% of their tweets to attack their opponents, but they tweet more
about Matteo Renzi (4.1%) and Silvio Berlusconi (3.9%) than they do about Luigi
Di Maio himself (3.8%). 

Conclusion

In recent years in Europe we have witnessed the
rise of the so-called ‘populist parties’, together with a wave of innovation in
(digital) political communication, especially during election campaigns.
Populist parties, in particular, have proven to be pioneers in the adoption of
innovative communication strategies. In a previous study on
the German electoral campaign (2017) we showed how the right-wing Alternative
for Germany (AfD) dominated the scene on Twitter thanks to a widespread use of
online channels, an unprecedented use of negative campaigning strategies and a
highly engaged network of supporters. We found similar when studying the online
behaviour of UKIP’s supporters at the time of the Brexit referendum.

On the eve of the Italian elections, we can see
how both the 5Star Movement and League candidates rely on some of these
communication strategies. Nevertheless, in their use of social media the two
parties have certain things in common, but they also differ. Both the 5SM and
the League display a greater ability to engage their network of online
supporters – being by far the two most retweeted parties, and bth tend to focus
on personalities rather than content. At the same time, political leaders play
a very different role in the online strategy of the two parties: while the
League devotes a huge attention (16%) to cheering on its leader Matteo Salvini,
the 5SM bypasses the figure of Luigi Di Maio to focus instead on negative campaigning
towards other leaders – most notably Renzi and Berlusconi.