Between populism and anti-populism: Changing patterns of the public discourse and the political communications style in the 2022 Italian Elections

Populism has been a recurrent phenomenon in Italy. The usage of populist political style left a significant trace of political communication practices in the country. In particular, the electoral success of the populist parties influenced the change of tactics for ideologically non-populist parties, which more often harness populist communication strategies. This research paper aims to study the populist and anti-populist political communications in the Italian context by political parties and leaders in social media campaigning. By collecting the Facebook posts of 14 political parties and leaders, the thesis checks the populist and anti-populist frames’ usage. Both ideologically populist and non-populist parties will be compared. The identification of both types of parties is based on the qualitative analysis of their party programmes. Based on Moffitt’s stylistic definition of populism, the research takes the following frames into account in creating the codebook of populist political communications: the people-elite dichotomy, vividness and provocativeness of the messages, bad manners underdog rhetoric, and maintaining the feeling of crisis. In addition, the anti-populist character of the post will be checked through negative references to the concept of populism in parties’ and leaders’ electoral posts. The posts are analysed both qualitatively and quantitively. The research will provide a qualitative analysis of populist and anti-populist messages during the 2022 electoral campaign via QDA Miner. Based on the results of the qualitative analysis, the thesis will employ the frames as independent variables for the linear regression with the following dependent variables: the policy area of the message, the political orientation of the party, the type of messages, and the period of the campaign. The paper expects the usage of populist political communication frames both by ideologically populist and non- populist parties, claiming that the populist style became dominant in social media campaigning in Italy. Hence, the results of the research paper insinuate the wider issue of populism. Through years the populist tactics have moved beyond populist parties, making it one of the possible strategies for the elections. Therefore, the paper not only concentrates on the reasons behind employing populist style by non- populist actors but also discusses the pros and cons of this phenomenon. In the end, I will discuss the possibilities for reducing the exposure of the parties and leaders to a populist communication style.