The mobilizing effect of intra-party and intra-coalition unity, credibility and coherence

The Italian general election held in September 2022 was marked by a unique confluence of factors. First, it was a snap election due to the downfall of the government led by Mario Draghi. The election campaign was consequently brief and (unusually) occurred during the summer. Second, the election took place in a political juncture affected by several crises, including the energy shortage, concerns about a military escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war and the heritage of the Covid pandemic. Third, the mixed electoral system, which combines majoritarian and proportional rules, compelled almost every political party to form strategic pre-election coalitions. Moreover, this was the first election held after a referendum that drastically slimmed down the number of seats in the parliament. Fourth, voting polls were unanimously pointing at the right-wing coalition’s victory, with Brothers of Italy in the lead. These specificities are expected to be reflected in parties’ social media communication strategies. In particular, the presence of pre-election coalitions might have pushed parties to emphasize their unity and the cohesion of their coalition, also pointing to the disunity of their rivals. Indeed, internal unity can affect voting patterns and previous studies have shown that internal divisions can reduce the level of valence perceived by voters, fostering negative evaluations on the party’s actual ability to run the country. In addition, in times of crisis, voters might care about parties’ valence attributes as they are more concerned with the effectiveness of policies (Krebs, 2009) and leaders’ competence in solving the emergency (Lipscy, 2020). Accordingly, voters could be attracted by a clear course of action proposed by one party or coalition as a response to the crisis while they will negatively judge the presence of contradictory voices. Altogether, we can expect that parties will strategically mobilize issues of party and coalition unity/disunity, coherence and credibility to increase their winning chances and decrease those of the opponents. In light of this, we aim to investigate whether this strategy pays off also online, generating more users’ engagement on social media platforms. Based on previous studies conducted on Facebook patterns of user engagement, we hypothesize that the higher the emphasis on valence attributes, including unity/disunity, credibility and coherence, the higher the level of user engagement.