Click here to download

Immigrations, styles and topics: A study about Italian politics tweet
Journal Title: RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA  
Author/s: Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe 
Year:  2020 Issue: 1 Language: Italian 
Pages:  21 Pg. 351-371 FullText PDF:  307 KB
DOI:  10.3280/RIP2020-001016
(DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation:  clicca qui   and here 


Immigration has been one of the most relevant topics during the Brexit Referendum, United States presidential election, and Italian and European Parliament elections (e.g., Zappettini, 2019; Faris, Roberts, Etling, Bourassa, Zuckerman, & Benkler, 2017). In particular, during these events, the anti-immigration-politicalgroups gain consensus (Muis and Immerzeel, 2017). In this study, we investigate, with a text-analysis of 1000 Italian political leaders’ tweets, which topics are associated with negative or positive sentiment toward immigrants. The results show that negative messages are associated, in a logistic regression model, with a populistic communication style, and with conspiracy suspicions. Moreover, a network analysis reveals that anti-immigration messages are associated with security and justice topics, whereas pro-immigration messages are associated with the topics of civil rights, culture, and Europe. Stylistics elements of populist and conspiratorial communication and their relation with the diffusion of anti-immigration contents and related consequences on composition and transmission of values, in social media context, are discussed.
Keywords: Immigration, populism, conspiratorial communication, social media, politics communication

  1. Baldi, S., & De Azevedo, R. C. (1999). La popolazione italiana verso il 2000: storia demografica dal dopoguerra ad oggi (Vol. 354). il Mulino.
  2. Baldwin-Philippi, J. (2019). The technological performance of populism. New Media & Society, 21(2), 376-397.
  3. Bale, J. M. (2007). Political paranoia v. political realism: on distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics. Patterns of Prejudice, 41(1), 45-60., DOI: 10.1080/0031322060111875
  4. Barabasi, A. L. (2016). Network science. Cambridge university press.
  5. Belkin, M., & Niyogi, P. (2002). Laplacian eigenmaps and spectral techniques for embedding and clustering. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 585-591).
  6. Berkhin, P. (2005). A survey on pagerank computing. Internet Mathematics, 2(1), 73-120., DOI: 10.1080/15427951.2005.10129098
  7. Bobba, G., & Roncarolo, F. (2018). The likeability of populism on social media in the 2018 Italian general election. Italian Political Science, 13(1), 51-62.
  8. Calo, E., Faggiano, M. P., Gallo, R., & Mongiardo, M. (2018). Italian general election 2018: digital campaign strategies. Three case studies: Movimento 5 Stelle, PD and Lega. In 2nd International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2018) (pp. 185-192). Editorial Universitat Politecnica de Valencia., DOI: 10.4995/CARMA2018.2018.834
  9. Capone, L. (2019). Sui migranti e tutto un complotto. Retrieved October 25, 2019, -- from https://www.ilfoglio.it/politica/2019/07/09/news/sui-migranti-etutto- Gleich, D. F. (2015). PageRank beyond the Web. SIAM Review, 57(3), 321-363., DOI: 10.1137/140976649
  10. Greco, R., YouTrend, R. G. C. di, Nato, & Nato. (2019). Tabella riassuntiva sondaggi: lo storico (2008-2018). Retrieved from https://www.youtrend.it/2012/02/10/tabella-riepilogo-sondaggi-politici-elettorali-storico-2008-2009-2010-2011-2012-2013-2014-2015-2016-2017/.
  11. Heiss, R., von Sikorski, C., & Matthes, J. (2019). Populist Twitter Posts in News Stories: Statement Recognition and the Polarizing Effects on Candidate Evaluation and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes. Journalism Practice, 1-17., DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2018.1564883
  12. Hogan, J., & Haltinner, K. (2015). Floods, invaders, and parasites: Immigration threat narratives and right-wing populism in the USA, UK and Australia. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 36(5), 520-54., DOI: 10.1080/07256868.2015.1072907
  13. Ihaka, R., & Gentleman, R. (1996). R: a language for data analysis and graphics. Journal of computational and graphical statistics, 5(3), 299-314., DOI: 10.1080/10618600.1996.10474713
  14. Jagers, J., & Walgrave, S. (2007). Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties’ discourse in Belgium. European journal of p o l i t i c a l r e s e a r c h, 46( 3 ) , 3 1 9 - 3 4 5 .
  15. Jeh, G., & Widom, J. (2002, July). SimRank: a measure of structural-context similarity. In Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 538-543). ACM.
  16. Jetten, J (2018). The wealth paradox: Prosperity and opposition to immigration. European Journal of Social Psychology.
  17. Kramer, B. (2017). Populist online practices: the function of the Internet in rightwing populism. Information, Communication & Society, 20(9), 1293-1309.
  18. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological review, 50(4), 370.
  19. McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public opinion quarterly, 36(2), 176-187., DOI: 10.1086/26799
  20. Muis, J., & Immerzeel, T. (2017). Causes and consequences of the rise of populist radical right parties and movements in Europe. Current Sociology, 65(6), 909-930., DOI: 10.1177/0011392117717294
  21. Nadotti, C. (2019, October 25). Italiani nel mondo: in 13 anni oltre 2 milioni in piu si sono spostati all’estero. Retrieved October 25, 2019, - from https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2019/10/25/news/italiani_nel_mondo_sono_i_piu_giovani_a_scegliere_di_andare_all_estero-239433727/?ref=RHPPLF-BH-I239438000-C8-P11-S1.8-T1.
  22. Ng, A. Y., Jordan, M. I., & Weiss, Y. (2002). On spectral clustering: Analysis and an algorithm. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 849-856).
  23. Page, L., Brin, S., Motwani, R., & Winograd, T. (1999). The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web. Stanford InfoLab.
  24. Di Virgilio, A., Giannetti, D., Pedrazzani, A., & Pinto, L. (2015). Party competition in the 2013 Italian elections: evidence from an expert survey. Government and Opposition, 50(1), 65-89.
  25. Diamanti, I. (2011). La sicurezza in Italia e in Europa. Significati, immagine e realta. Quarta indagine sulla rappresentazione sociale e mediatica della sicurezza. Fondazione Unipolis, Roma.
  26. Drieger, P. (2013). Semantic network analysis as a method for visual text analytics. Procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 79, 4-17.
  27. Fondazione Unipolis (2017). X Rapporto sulla sicurezza e l’insicurezza sociale in Italia e in Europa. Significati, immagini e realta–Percezione, rappresentazione sociale e mediatica della sicurezza. -- Reperibile su http://www.fondazioneunipolis.org.
  28. Fortunato, S. (2010). Community detection in graphs. Physics reports, 486(3-5), 75-174.
  29. Greco, R., YouTrend, R. G. C. di, Nato, & Nato. (2019). Tabella riassuntiva sondaggi: lo storico (2008-2018). -- Retrieved from https://www.youtrend.it/2012/02/10/tabella-riepilogo-sondaggi-politici-elettorali-storico-2008-2009-2010-2011-2012-2013-2014-2015-2016-2017/.
  30. Heiss, R., von Sikorski, C., & Matthes, J. (2019). Populist Twitter Posts in News Stories: Statement Recognition and the Polarizing Effects on Candidate Evaluation and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes. Journalism Practice, 1-17., DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2018.1564883
  31. Gleich, D. F. (2015). PageRank beyond the Web. SIAM Review, 57(3), 321-363., DOI: 10.1137/140976649
  32. Hogan, J., & Haltinner, K. (2015). Floods, invaders, and parasites: Immigration threat narratives and right-wing populism in the USA, UK and Australia. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 36(5), 520-54., DOI: 10.1080/07256868.2015.1072907
  33. Ihaka, R., & Gentleman, R. (1996). R: a language for data analysis and graphics. Journal of computational and graphical statistics, 5(3), 299-314., DOI: 10.1080/10618600.1996.10474713
  34. Jagers, J., & Walgrave, S. (2007). Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties’ discourse in Belgium. European journal of p o l i t i c a l r e s e a r c h, 46( 3 ) , 3 1 9 - 3 4 5 .
  35. Jeh, G., & Widom, J. (2002, July). SimRank: a measure of structural-context similarity. In Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 538-543). ACM.
  36. Jetten, J (2018). The wealth paradox: Prosperity and opposition to immigration. European Journal of Social Psychology.
  37. Kramer, B. (2017). Populist online practices: the function of the Internet in rightwing populism. Information, Communication & Society, 20(9), 1293-1309.
  38. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological review, 50(4), 370.
  39. McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public opinion quarterly, 36(2), 176-187., DOI: 10.1086/26799
  40. Muis, J., & Immerzeel, T. (2017). Causes and consequences of the rise of populist radical right parties and movements in Europe. Current Sociology, 65(6), 909-930., DOI: 10.1177/0011392117717294
  41. Nadotti, C. (2019, October 25). Italiani nel mondo: in 13 anni oltre 2 milioni in piu si sono spostati all’estero. -- Retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2019/10/25/news/italiani_nel_mondo_sono_i_piu_giovani_a_scegliere_di_andare_all_estero-239433727/?ref=RHPPLF-BH-I239438000-C8-P11-S1.8-T1.
  42. Ng, A. Y., Jordan, M. I., & Weiss, Y. (2002). On spectral clustering: Analysis and an algorithm. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 849-856).
  43. Page, L., Brin, S., Motwani, R., & Winograd, T. (1999). The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web. Stanford InfoLab.
  44. Putra, I. E., Mashuri, A., & Zaduqisti, E. (2015). Demonising the victim: Seeking the answer for how a group as the violent victim is blamed. Psychology and Developing Societies, 27(1), 31-57., DOI: 10.1177/0971333614564741
  45. Shapiro, M. A., & Hemphill, L. (2014). Policy-Related Communications and Agenda Setting: Twitter, New York Times, and the Widening Soapbox. New Yo r k Time s , a n d t h e Wi d e n i n g S o a p b o x (Ap r i l 3 , 2 0 1 4 ).
  46. Sunstein, C. R., & Vermeule, A. (2009). Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures. Journal of Political Philosophy, 17(2), 202-227.
  47. Swami, V., Barron, D., Weis, L., & Furnham, A. (2018). To B rexit or not to B rexit: The roles of I slamophobia, conspiracist beliefs, and integrated threat in voting intentions for the U nited K ingdom E uropean U nion membership ref e r e n d um. British Journal of Psychology, 109(1), 156-179.
  48. Tajfel, H. (1974). Social identity and intergroup behaviour. Information (Internat i o n a l S o c i a l S c i e n c e C o u n c i l ), 13( 2 ) , 6 5 - 9 3 . D O I : 10.1177/053901847401300204.
  49. Vaes, J., Latrofa, M., Suitner, C., & Arcuri, L. (2017). They Are All Armed and Dangerous!. Journal of Media Psychology.
  50. Vaes, J., Latrofa, M., Vieno, A., & Pastore, M. (2015). Exposure to politicized media and prejudice against immigrants in Italy: Identifying its impact and psychological mediators. Psicologia sociale, 10(2), 141-160.
  51. Valtolina, G. G. (2010). I cittadini europei e l’immigrazione: gli italiani sono i piu preoccupati. Libertacivili., DOI: 10.3280/LIC2010-006013
  52. Van Prooijen, J. W., & Acker, M. (2015). The influence of control on belief in conspiracy theories: Conceptual and applied extensions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(5), 753-761.

Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe, Immigrations, styles and topics: A study about Italian politics tweet in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA " 1/2020, pp. 351-371, DOI:10.3280/RIP2020-001016

   

FrancoAngeli is a member of Publishers International Linking Association a not for profit orgasnization wich runs the CrossRef service, enabing links to and from online scholarly content