Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T14:05:34.786Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Where the wind blows: Five Star Movement’s populism, direct democracy and ideological flexibility

Part of: IPSR-RISP 5-Star Collection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2017

Luca Manucci  and
Michi Amsler
Luca Manucci*
Affiliation:
Institute of Political Science, University of Zurich/NCCR Democracy, Zurich, Switzerland
Michi Amsler
Affiliation:
Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
*
*E-mail: [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

The paper focusses on the online political discourse of the Five Star Movement (5SM) and its strategic adaptability. The main goal of the analysis is to establish how salient several topics are over time in order to test the party’s ideological flexibility. Indeed, 5SM’s post-ideological approach and its emphasis on direct-democratic tools might constitute a winning formula for other populist parties willing to exploit the crisis of the mainstream parties and representation. The paper, through an automated content analysis, tracks the longitudinal evolution of the salience of the topics addressed by 5SM on the party’s blog. This allows us to establish which topics are at the core of the party’s message and which, on the other hand, have been raised strategically over time. Results show that 5SM’s discourse is very flexible and adaptable: it devotes a large space to the importance of direct democracy while flexibly addressing different topics depending on the political and social context.

Keywords

populismdirect democracyideologypolitical discourse
Type
Research Article
Information
Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 109 - 132
Copyright
© Società Italiana di Scienza Politica 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arzheimer, K. (2009), ‘Contextual factors and the extreme right vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002’, American Journal of Political Science 53(2): 259–275.Google Scholar
Béja, A. (2013), ‘Beppe Grillo: Quand Les Étoiles S’éteignent’, Esprit 397(8): 98–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biorcio, R. (2014), ‘The reasons for the success and transformations of the 5 Star Movement’, Contemporary Italian Politics 6(1): 37–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biorcio, R. and Natale, P. (2013), ‘Politica a 5 Stelle. Idee, Storia E Strategie Del Movimento Di Grillo’. September, Milano: Feltrinelli, 155 pp. http://dx.doi.org/:10.1080/23248823.2013.809191.Google Scholar
Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y. and Jordan, M.I. (2003), ‘Latent Dirichlet allocation’, The Journal of Machine Learning Research 3: 993–1022.Google Scholar
Bordignon, F. and Ceccarini, L. (2013), ‘Five Stars and a cricket. Beppe Grillo shakes Italian politics’, South European Society and Politics 18(4): 427–449.Google Scholar
Bordignon, F. and Ceccarini, L. (2014), ‘Protest and project, leader and party: normalisation of the Five Star Movement’, Contemporary Italian Politics 6(1): 54–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brug, W.V.D., Fennema, M. and Tillie, J. (2005), ‘Why some anti-immigrant parties fail and others succeed’, Comparative Political Studies 38(5): 537–573.Google Scholar
Canovan, M. (1999), ‘Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy’, Political Studies 47(1): 2–16.Google Scholar
Caramani, D. (2017), ‘Will vs. reason: the populist and technocratic forms of political representation and their critique to party government’, American Political Science Review 111(1): 54–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ceccarini, L. and Bordignon, F. (2016), ‘The Five Stars continue to shine: the consolidation of Grillo’s “Movement Party” in Italy’, Contemporary Italian Politics 8(2): 131–159.Google Scholar
Colloca, P., Corbetta, P., Galli, E., Marangoni, F., Passarelli, G., Pedrazzani, A., Pinto, L., Tronconi, F. and Vignati, R. (2013), ‘Elezioni Politiche Del 2013’. Retrieved October 2017 from http://www.reset.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Analisi-Istituto-Cattaneo-Elezioni-politiche-2013-Flussi-elettorali.pdf.Google Scholar
Conti, N. and Memoli, V. (2015), ‘The emergence of a new party in the Italian party system: rise and fortunes of the Five Star Movement’, West European Politics 2382: 1–19.Google Scholar
Corbetta, P. and Gualmini, E. (2013), ‘Il Partito Di Grillo’, September, Bologna: Il Mulino, 242 pp. http://dx.doi.org/:10.1080/23248823.2013.808861.Google Scholar
Corbetta, P. and Vignati, R. (2014), ‘Direct democracy and scapegoats: the Five Star Movement and Europe’, The International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs 49(1): 53–64.Google Scholar
Cosenza, G. (2014), ‘Grillo’s communication style: from swear words to body language’, Contemporary Italian Politics 6(1): 89–101.Google Scholar
Dahl, R. (1956), A Preface to Democratic Theory, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Diamanti, I. (2013), ‘Una Mappa Della Democrazia Rappresentativa’, Comunicazione Politica 5(1): 3–16.Google Scholar
Diamanti, I. (2014), ‘The 5 Star Movement: a political laboratory’, Contemporary Italian Politics 6(1): 4–15.Google Scholar
Elchardus, M. and Spruyt, B. (2016), ‘Populism, persistent republicanism and declinism: an empirical analysis of populism as a thin ideology’, Government and Opposition 51(1): 111–133.Google Scholar
Floridia, A. and Vignati, R. (2014), ‘Deliberative, direct or participatory? The challenges of the 5 Star Movement to representative democracy’, Quaderni Di Sociologia 65: 51–74.Google Scholar
Franzosi, P., Marone, F. and Salvati, E. (2015), ‘Populism and Euroscepticism in the Italian Five Star Movement’, The International Spectator 50(2): 109–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, K. (2009), ‘Is Chavez Populist?: Measuring populist discourse in comparative perspective’, Comparative Political Studies 42(8): 1040–1067.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herkman, J. (2017), ‘The Finns Party: Euroscepticism, euro crisis, populism and the media’, Media and Communication 5(2): 1–10.Google Scholar
Hix, S. (2008), What’s Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It, Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Honnibal, M. and Johnson, M. (2015), ‘An improved non-monotonic transition system for dependency parsing’. Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Lisbon, 17–21 September 2015, pp. 1373–1378.Google Scholar
Hooghe, L., Marks, G. and Wilson, C.J. (2002), ‘Does left/right structure party positions on European integration?’, Comparative Political Studies 38(8): 965–989.Google Scholar
Ivarsflaten, E. (2005), ‘The vulnerable populist right parties: no economic realignment fuelling their electoral success’, European Journal of Political Research 44: 465–492.Google Scholar
Kioupkiolis, A. (2016), ‘Podemos: the ambiguous promises of left-wing populism in contemporary Spain’, Journal of Political Ideologies 21(2): 1–22.Google Scholar
Laclau, E. (2005), On Populist Reason, London: Verso.Google Scholar
de la Torre, C. (2013), ‘Technocratic populism in Ecuador’, Journal of Democracy 24(3): 33–47.Google Scholar
Mair, P. (1997), Party System Change: Approaches and Interpretations, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Mouffe, C. (2000), The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso.Google Scholar
Mudde, C. (2004), ‘The populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition 39(4): 542–563.Google Scholar
Mudde, C. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2012), Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy?, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Natale, S. and Ballatore, A. (2014), ‘The web will kill them all: new media, digital Utopia, and political struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement’, Media, Culture & Society 36(1): 105–121.Google Scholar
Orazi, F. and Socci, M. (2014), Il Grillismo. Tra Democrazia Elettronica E Movimento, Rome: Carocci.Google Scholar
Pasquino, G. (2005), ‘Populism and democracy’. The Johns Hopkins University, The Bologna Center Publications Series, Special Lecture Series n. 3, April, Bologna.Google Scholar
Pedrazzani, A. and Pinto, L. (2015), ‘The electoral base: the “political revolution” in evolution’, in F. Tronconi (ed.), Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement: Organisation, Communication and Ideology, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 75–99.Google Scholar
Pedregosa, F., Varoquaux, G., Gramfort, A., Michel, V., Thirion, B., Grisel, O., Blondel, M., Prettenhofer, P., Weiss, R., Dubourg, V., Vanderplas, J., Passos, A., Cournapeau, D., Brucher, M., Perrot, M. and Duchesnay, E. (2011), ‘Scikit-learn: machine learning in Python’, The Journal of Machine Learning Research 12: 2825–2830.Google Scholar
Pettit, P. (2004), ‘Depoliticizing democracy’, Ratio Juris 17: 52–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rooduijn, M. (2015), ‘The rise of the populist radical right in western Europe’, European View 14(1): 3–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2012), ‘The ambivalence of populism: threat and corrective for democracy’, Democratization 19(2): 184–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russo, L., Riera, P. and Verthé, T. (2017), ‘Tracing the electorate of the MoVimento Cinque Stelle: an ecological inference analysis’, Italian Political Science Review 47(1): 45–62.Google Scholar
Santoro, G. (2012), Un Grillo Qualunque: Il Movimento 5 Stelle E Il Populismo Digitale Nella Crisi Dei Partiti Italiani, Rome: Castelvecchi.Google Scholar
Sartori, G. (1968), ‘Representation Systems’. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, pp. 465–474.Google Scholar
Stanley, B. (2008), ‘The thin ideology of populism’, Journal of Political Ideologies 13(1): 95–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stevens, K., Kegelmeyer, P., Andrzejewski, D. and Buttler, D. (2012), ‘Exploring topic coherence over many models and many topics’. Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, Jeju Island, Korea, 12–14 July 2012, pp. 952–961.Google Scholar
Taggart, P. (2004), ‘Populism and representative politics in contemporary Europe’, Journal of Political Ideologies 9(3): 269–288.Google Scholar
Tarchi, M. (2015), Italia Populista, Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Tronconi, F. (2013), ‘Da Dove Arrivano I Voti Del Movimento 5 Stelle?’, Il Mulino 2: 356–363.Google Scholar
Urbinati, N. (1998), ‘Democracy and populism’, Constellations 5(1): 110–124.Google Scholar
Woods, D. and Lanzone, L. (2015), ‘Riding the populist web: contextualizing the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy’, Politics and Governance 3(2): 54–64.Google Scholar
Zanatta, L. (2013), Il Populismo, Rome: Carocci.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Manucci and Amsler Dataset

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/E05GUN
Link
Supplementary material: File

Manucci and Amsler supplementary material

Online Appendices

Download Manucci and Amsler supplementary material(File)
File 20.5 KB