Populism and Negative Emotions within the Italian Politics: A Twitter-based Analysis

Résumé En

While conceptualizing populism as “a cultural-relational performative style” (Moffitt et al. 2016), this paperseeks to explore whether and the extent to which semantic categories of populism and the emotional frames ofanger and fear are combined in the tweets posted by selected Italian politicians and political parties on theirTwitter account. Methodologically, a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches was adopted:Content Analysis, to pinpoint recurrent thematic patterns that are relevant to the research purpose; as well asapproaches of Multiple Correspondence Analysis, to verify whether the combination of the chosen variables isrecurrent within the Twitter corpus purposely built for the analysis. The same tools were used to exploredifferences in the use of populism and emotional frames on the basis of gender, provenance and the local versusnational political activity of the politicians under analysis. Results have showed that there exists a correlationbetween the use of given semantic categories of populism (i.e. ‘Appeal to people’, ‘Ostracizing the others’,‘Attacking the elite’) and the frame of anger. The combined use of these categories was mostly detected in thetweeting style of Italian politicians and parties that collocate on the right-wing political spectrum. Moreover,preliminary findings showed a significant difference in the degree of populism depending either on the nationalor local political activity.