Varieties of populism: insights from the Italian case

Abstract

Academic attention to populism has sharply increased in recent years. Yet, a commonly accepted definition is still lacking, with scholars disagreeing on categorization, labels, and boundaries between its different manifestations. In this article, through an analysis of Euromanifestos and party statutes, we address the interactions between Italian political parties and populism by adopting the various definitions available in populism theory, that is, populism as (i) ideology, (ii) rhetoric, (iii) communication style, and (iv) organization. Our aim is to identify all major attributes linked to populism and empirically investigate them with lower level indicators, measuring and comparing them across Italian parties and over time. The empirical analysis, conducted through a formalized content analysis of the European electoral programmes and party statutes, considers populism not as a discrete concept but rather as a continuous one and therefore enables us to undercover the variety of populisms within the Italian parties. The main finding of the article is that over the last decades all Italian parties have shown some signs of populism and that the intensification of populist features is strongly linked to the exarcebation of the financial and economic crisis, and its governance.

Populist online communication: introduction to the special issue

“…Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that the body of scientific literature on populism has been growing (Aalberg, Esser, Reinemann, Strömbäck, & de Vreese, 2017;de la Torre, 2015;Inglehart & Norris, 2016;Kriesi & Pappas, 2015;Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012b). The concept has been discussed theoretically (Alvares & Dahlgren, 2016;Esser, Stepinska, & Hopmann, 2017;Krämer, 2014;Mazzoleni, 2003;Wirth et al, 2016) and has been empirically analyzed in various communication channels, such as manifestos (Caiani & Graziano, 2016;Rooduijn, De Lange, & Van der Brug, 2014), party broadcasts (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007), speeches (Hawkins, 2009;Oliver & Rahn, 2016), the press (Akkerman, 2011;Herkman, 2017;Rooduijn, 2014), news broadcasts (Bos, van der Brug, & de Vreese, 2011), and talk shows (Bos & Brants, 2014;Cranmer, 2011).…”

Globalization and Electoral Outcomes: Evidence from Italy

“…This is the reason why the analysis is mainly based on exploiting the cross-regional variation (where local labour markets are used to determine regions): irrespective of the general political trends at the national level, the common working hypothesis is that conservative and nationalist parties might gain voting shares in the areas more exposed to globalization. science literature on populism and anti-establishment voting (Schedler, 1996;Barr, 2009;Hernandez and Kriesi, 2016;Kriesi, 2014;Caiani and Graziano, 2016;Schumacher and van Kersbergen, 2016), and particularly those papers investigating the economic determinants of the rise of the current wave of populism in Western liberal democracies (Inglehart and Norris, 2016;Guiso et al, 2017), have been another important reference. This said, this work does not include an analysis of individual-level vote choices/preferences (as done instead by Colantone and Stanig, 2018b), which is left for further research.…”

Socially mediated populism: the communicative strategies of political leaders on Facebook

“…'Us' stands for the common citizen and 'them' represents the common enemy established by the dominant elite, which may sometimes be identified under different headings (politics, media, economic powers, etc.). According to a Manichean view of society elites are corrupt, exploitative, and disrespectful of the real interests and needs of the people (Akkerman et al, 2014;Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008;Biorcio, 2015;Bos et al, 2013;Caiani and Graziano, 2016;Canovan, 1981;Hawkins et al, 2012;Jagers and Walgrave, 2007;Mény and Surel, 2002;Mudde, 2004;Taggart, 2000;van Kessel and Castelein, 2016;Wirth et al, 2016). Targeted elites can vary according to the context and the aims of the political actors: political, economic, institutional, media, intellectuals, etc.…”