Italy, the Promised Land of Populism? Evidence from an Expert Survey on European Parties and Social Media Big Data

The aim of the paper is to analyse the issue of politicization of anti-political-establishment sentiment that emerges in Italy during the 2018 political elections. Due to the disputed nature of the representative democracy in contemporary political systems, different forms of anti-politics may emerge, taking the form of an oppositional sentiment on the level of the masses, which can either manifest itself as apathy or detachment (and therefore abstentionism), or take the form of an active anti-politics. Populism tends to graft itself onto ideologies that are already present in the political conflict, with parties and leaders that, even if considered as anti-establishment outsiders, are characterized as anti-party parties of the new radical right and new radical left, and not as traditional anti-system parties. The phenomenon of populism finds particularly fertile soil in the case of Italy, for structural reasons related to the historical events that have marked the formation of its political system and due to the effect of the traumatic thawing of mass parties after the collapse of the main post-World War II parties. The 2008 crisis provided further possibilities for changes in the political framework and created another structure for developing new populist political parties. The political Italian system witnessed an increase in the number of political subjects linked to populism with three different cases: the Five Stars Movement, Matteo Renzi's leadership of the PD, and the Lega of Matteo Salvini. However, albeit with different intensity, a large part of parties and leaders witness some populist characteristics. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the ambivalent political offer of Italian populism by combining data from an Expert Survey (Mapping Populism in Europe – MAPE) conducted at a European level, and big data analysis of Italian leaders and parties FB posts and Tweets. The main results of the Italian case will be presented through the reconstruction of the positioning of Italian parties and leaders on a number of crucial characteristics: leadership, policy issues, ideology, electoral and communication strategies. We will thus reconstruct a typology of populist parties and leaders in Italy.