Applying Topic Modelling to Party Discourse: An Exploration of the Italian Case in 2013–2019

Abstract

During the last few years, external crises and endogenous weaknesses have combined to plunge the Italian political system into generalised instability. In particular, the major political parties have experienced rapidly turning tides in a context of intensified electoral volatility. This explorative article sets out to get an insight into the discursive struggles that have pitted these parties one against another, undergirding the ebb and flow in their respective mass support and revolving around the ways of communicating political change. To that end, I collect data from the official Facebook pages of the four main Italian parties, downloading posts they published in the period 2013–2019 via the Netvizz application, and I analyse the four corresponding textual corpora through the technique of Topic Modelling. On such bases, the article finds the overall configuration of the political discourse of Italian parties to be aptly described by a model comprising 16 topics, equally divided into ‘partisan’ and ‘cross-cutting’ ones, with the former having a slight edge in terms of diffusion. The four parties differ among themselves by the topics they focus on and by the quantity of topics they choose to include sizably in their streams of communication.

Heritage and Nationalism

“…Information published on the blog was often distributed further and more widely via Facebook and Twitter (Bailo 2015;Bordignon and Ceccarini 2015;Di Giammaria and Faggiano 2017). Pareschi (2020) has recently undertaken topic modelling of the posts published from 2013 to 2019 on the public Facebook pages of the League, 5SM, PD and Forza Italia. The results show that, among the 16 topics that were identified, immigration characterised the discourse of the League and socio-economic issues that of 5SM, more than in the case of any other party.…”