35 research outputs found
Representations of immigration on Facebook: A lexicographic analysis of the communication of Italian political leaders and their followers (2019-2021)
No full textThis study proposes a psycho-social reading of immigration communication on Facebook by five Italian political leaders and their followers during the Conte II government (5/09/2019-13/02/2021).
We analyzed the discursive construction of the migration phenomenon in the posts published by two leaders of the right and center-right populist parties (Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, respectively), the leader of the populist catch-all party 5-Star Movement (Luigi Di Maio) and two left-wing non-populist leaders (Nicola Zingaretti and Laura Boldrini), to ensure comprehensive coverage of the different political ideologies in the Italian context. The textual analysis, with the Spad-t statistical package, highlighted two opposing ways of constructing the representations of the migration: that of the populist right of the angry-disparaging exclusionary type and that humanitarian inclusive of the center-left, while the transversal populism is placed in an intermediated position with exclusionary rhetoric without emotional tones. Furthermore, comments related to these posts, made by ordinary users of Facebook, were examined, showing that the narratives of political leaders are able to influence social representations of migrants in their constituents: while the posts published by populist leaders predominantly generate comments expressing anger and fear towards migrants, the posts of the two non-populist leaders favor the publication of less emotionally charged comments
Representations of immigration on Facebook: A lexicographic analysis of the communication of Italian populist and non-populist leaders (2019-2021)
No full textThis study proposes a psycho-social reading of immigration communication on Facebook by five Italian political leaders during the Conte II government (5 September 2019 to 13 February 2021). The research is inserted into the theoretical framework of social representations that presuppose the complexity and tendentiousness of language by actively participating in constructing reality. We analyzed the discursive construction of the migration phenomenon in the posts published by two leaders of the right and center-right populist parties (Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, respectively), the leader of the populist catch-all party 5-Star Movement (Luigi Di Maio) and two left-wing non-populist leaders (Nicola Zingaretti and Laura Boldrini), to ensure comprehensive coverage of the different political ideologies in the Italian context. From the entire corpus of posts published by the five leaders under examination during the analyzed period, only the posts concerning immigration were selected, for a total of 1171 posts. Of these, 311 were published by Giorgia Meloni, 760 by Matteo Salvini, 45 by Luigi Di Maio, 30 by Laura Boldrini, and 25 by Nicola Zingaretti. We noticed essential differences in communication regarding the migration phenomenon, with the two right and center-right-wing populist leaders (Meloni and Salvini) more likely to publish posts about immigration and promoting a negative representation of the migration phenomenon, in contrast to Di Maio and especially the two left-wing non-populist leaders Boldrini and Zingaretti
The elections for the President of the Italian Republic in the newspapers. Between old and new representations of the men and women candidates
No full textPolitical violence promoted by conspiracy beliefs: empirical application of the 3N model of radicalization.
No full textLinguistic gendered biases in the representations of populist and nonpopulist Italian leaders. Naming strategies and psycholinguistic markers on the Facebook comments of their followers
No full textStudies on journalistic communication highlighted systematic gendered biases when naming women politicians compared to their men colleagues. These biases manifested in fewer references to women’s political offices, often opting for their first name or both first name and surname. Conversely, for men, there was a preference for using solely their surname. Experimental research has shown the negative consequences of these biases for women. With our study, we have shifted the attention to common-sense conveyed by Facebook. Between September 2019 and February 2021, we analyzed 43,796 comments from followers of two pairs of Italian politicians (one right-wing populist, the other center-left nonpopu- list) during the Italian Conte II cabinet. VOSPEC method of the textual statistical software SPAD-T allowed the identification of the most significant lemmas for the followers of each leader. The outputs also enabled a qualitative study of the discursive context of these lemmas. We discussed the results fo- cusing on persistent androcentrism in politics
COVID-19 Threat and Uncertainty: How Outcome Anticipation Shapes Responses to the Unknown
No full textUncertainty was a common theme in political speeches, fundraising emails, and TV advertisements throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The anxiety and distress felt by many all over the world was presumed to be directly tied to the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic. Yet, these negative feelings cannot be extricated from the negative outcomes associated with COVID-19: Serious illness, death, loss of a loved one, loss of a job, and loss of education for one's child, among others. In this chapter, we posit that negative feelings about the uncertainty engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic are due not to the uncertainty itself, but rather to expectations of negative outcomes to the pandemic, informed in part by people's past experiences. We bolster this argument using experimental data as well as findings that people who were less at risk for negative outcomes during the pandemic (e.g., those with a higher socioeconomic status) experienced less distress about it, and that people who were more at risk (e.g., people with chronic illness, healthcare professionals) experienced more distress. We also highlight the role of optimism and resilience in predicting more positive reactions to uncertain situations, including COVID-19, demonstrating that people's expectations of both positive outcomes and their own abilities to cope with potential negative outcomes inform their reactions to uncertainty
Extremism and political violence: the mediated effect of epistemic and significance motivations.
No full textThis study analyzes the motivational processes underlying political group extremism, namely a
willful collective behavior that violates the norms of expected conduct in a given context (Levine
& Kruglanski, 2022; Kruglanski et al., 2017). Extremist conducts are produced by a motivational
imbalance (Kruglanski et al., 2022), where one dominant need—the quest for personal
significance (QFS)—overrides all the others. Following Levine and Kruglanski (2022) and Hogg
(2021), another antecedent hypothesized for group extremism is the individuals’ desire for
certain, clear-cut and ambiguity-free knowledge (need for cognitive closure, NFC, Kruglanski &
Webster, 1996), since the absence of such knowledge poses a major threat to people’s self-
esteem as valuable and competent social actors. Both needs have been associated with extreme
political worldviews (Jasko, et al., 2020, Webber et al., 2018). In this vein, we argue that such
existential (QFS) and epistemic (NFC) needs are associated to non-normative political
engagement (Moskalenko & McCauley, 2009) through the mediation effect of motivational
extremism (ME). In two correlational samples (n 1 = 567, n 2 = 764), we observed how ME was
associated to the QFS and the NFC. In turn, such needs exerted an indirect effect on non-
normative engagement, partially (QFS) or totally (NFC) mediated by ME. According to this
argument, the results showed that the relation between epistemic / significance-affirming
motivations and non-normative political engagement was mediated by extremism conceived as
motivational imbalance. Specifically, while the QFS showed both direct and indirect effects on
engagement, NFC showed indirect effect only
Significance loss and political vs. religious terrorism: a textual analysis
No full textDrawing on Significance Quest Theory, we applied the LIWC-based textual analysis to the Honor Dictionary to investigate lone-actors terrorists’ rhetoric. Specifically, we examined texts from the Extremist Manifesto Database (EMD) and compared writings by terrorists driven by political ideologies (left & right-wing, ethno-nationalists, and anti-government, N=65) with those of terrorists motivated by religious ideologies (N=23). Given that religious extremists are particularly sensitive to honor threats, we expected that religious terrorists’ rhetoric would have been more tinged in honor loss than political terrorists’ one. Indeed, we found that lone-actor religious terrorists' rhetoric, compared to lone-actors’ political one, contained more honor-loss words. Contrary to our predictions instead, we did not find any difference with respect to honor-gain words. Notably, this is the first research to use the Honor Dictionary to linguistically measure the activation of the need for significance, demonstrating a strong correlation with extreme ideologies endorsement. Further, our research supports the hypothesis that extreme ideologists’ rhetoric reflects significance loss feelings
Navigating uncertainty: how war and COVID-19 threats shape populist sentiment through need for cognitive closure
No full textSocial crises and threatening situations can undermine the sense of certainty leading individuals to seek self-affirming means such as subscribing to belief systems and ideologies that are unambiguous, all-encompassing, and explanatory such as populism. In two cross-sectional datasets collected in Italy one year apart, we tested the indirect effect of different kinds of threats (i.e., threats related to COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine Conflict) on populist attitudes through Need for Cognitive Closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994, NFCC). In 2022 (N = 1668), we found that both the perceived threat posed by COVID-19 and the threat posed by the Russia-Ukraine Conflict were positively related to NFCC, which in turn was positively related to high levels of populist attitudes. When controlling for the indirect effect of NFCC, COVID-19 threat still held a significant direct effect on populist attitudes, suggesting a partial mediation. The effect of the threat related to the ongoing war on populist attitudes was fully mediated by NFCC. In 2023 (N = 1152), similarly to what we found in the data collected in 2022, the effect of the COVID-19 threat on populist attitudes was partially mediated by NFCC. Whereas the effect of the threat posed by the war was not mediated by NFCC, but directly and positively linked to populist attitudes. Our findings highlighted how populism serves an explanatory function and sense-making when uncertainty arouses from threatening circumstances. Moreover, they underscore the importance of considering contextual variations and distinct threat types when exploring the dynamics of threat perception, and cognitive processes such as perception of uncertainty, and populist attitudes. The results are discussed in light of the relevant literature on threats and the circumstances at the time of the data collection
