The stories they tell: news coverage of differentiated autonomy in Italy during the years

The Italian “quasi federalism” has been moving towards a “de jure autonomy” since regions asked the central government for further autonomy at the end of 2018. The negotiations between the former centre-left government and three regions that began in 2018 have arisen some concerns about interregional solidarity. The topic was again under discussion with the election of a new government in 2018, especially after the requests made by other regions at the end of the year. Even if the Covid-19 crisis temporarily paused the negotiations, at the beginning of 2023, the newly elected right-wing government presented a draft law regulating the procedure for subnational governments to ask for further powers, reviving the debate around the effects of differentiated regional autonomy. Therefore, the paper investigates the media coverage of the topic with the aim of observing similarities and differences in the evolution of the debate over time: from the beginning of October to the end of February of the periods 2017-2018, 2018-2019 and 2022-2023. The three periods are characterised by key events with regards to differentiated regional autonomy; however, they differentiate on the basis of three elements: i) the composition of national government in power and the presence of favourable policy entrepreneurs in the majority coalition; ii) the preferences of the main actors (national and regional political leaders); iii) the events of the pandemic crisis and its consequences. We expect the public debate to be affected by a double polarisation: one stuck to the left-right affiliation, the other to the North-South divide. To this aim, we have analysed all the articles published by five of the main Italian newspapers, selected by diffusion and different political orientation (Il Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Giornale, Il Fatto Quotidiano) which contain at least one of a list of keywords related to the differentiated regional autonomy. The articles were collected through the Factiva - Dow Jones database. In total, 737 articles were analysed through QDA Miner, a program for the qualitative analysis of texts, and WordStat, a text mining tool used to identify the most recurring themes within a corpus of articles. The media coverage analysis is not new in social sciences; however, its use certainly is a novelty in regional policy studies. For this reason, this interdisciplinary approach could be capable of bringing to light new aspects to be discussed. The analysis of the print press allows us to understand how the issue of differentiated regional autonomy was covered and whether specific sub-topics emerged during the three periods, in consideration of the ability of the Italian newspapers to still shape the public agenda.