Roberta Bracciale

Abstract: Populism has been defined in many different ways, mostly in regard to political ideology and political dynamics, but only in recent years in relation to communication variables. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the identification of a socially mediated type of populist communication profoundly affected by the specific nature of social media. It presents and discusses empirical evidence on Italy’s populist and non-populist leaders that use Facebook regularly, and highlights the extent of the overflow of populist communication patterns and ideological features into mainstream political communication. Populist ideology fragments emerged in Italian leaders’ Facebook posts, thus leading to two main conclusions: first, populism appears to be ‘endemic’ in the Italian online facebooksphere; second, political actors—even non-populist ones—do not disdain the adoption of typical populist rhetorics.

TL;DR: This article examined the communication of the three main Italian political parties in terms of communication while distinguishing between its ideological and stylistic dimensions, and examined the social media communication of these three main parties.

TL;DR: Populist ideology and emotions are being increasingly adopted by political leaders as communicative tools to drive attention and gain consent as discussed by the authors, and they appear to be intimately related to emotions.