Andrea Ceron

University of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Social and Political Sciences

Presidents in parliamentary democracies are commonly perceived as neutral actors, with limited influence on everyday politics. However, Italian heads of state have the widest set of powers among European parliamentary democracies. Recent episodes occurring during the presidential terms of Giorgio Napolitano and Sergio Mattarella suggest that heads...

This paper investigates how parties spread news from traditional media on their social network accounts to engage followers. In particular, we address why parties would choose to include in the ‘media digest’ they carefully craft for their followers also content from ‘hostile’ media outlets and journalists. We analyze 4,586 Facebook posts published...

Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament campaign, we investigate parties’ engagement in negative campaigning on Facebook and the relationship to a parties’ ideology and their status as governing versus opposition party at the national level. Manual coding of 8,153 Facebook posts of parties from twelve European countries shows parties create less n...

On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political contents citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors’ Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visi...

Switches produce a lack of credibility and damage a party's image, signaling weakness and an inability to select loyal MPs and preserve unity. Accordingly, we consider party out‐switching as a valence loss for the party. By combining information on party manifestos with a novel database on 2053 episodes of party switching, we investigate which elec...

The 2019 European election in Italy had a distinctive national impact, given the pivotal role played by Matteo Salvini’s League, back then in government with the Five Star Movement (M5S). Both parties campaigned to highlight their influence on core issues within the government coalition. The League dominated the online campaign producing an outstan...

This article develops a reputational theory of political falsehoods. Politicians are motivated by the desire to build a positive reputation, therefore, they will be more likely to deliver false statements (incurring the risk of being fact-checked) when the potential benefit outweighs the cost. This happens as new elections come closer, since the el...

This analysis of issue emphasis on Twitter by the seven main German parties during the 2017 federal election campaign underlines the importance of taking a time-sensitive approach when investigating issue competition. We show that the attention parties give to issues they are associated with fluctuates frequently on social media and alternates with...

Scholars argued that anti-establishment parties use a populist rhetoric that appeals to the worst instincts of people. Indeed, populist politicians are often viewed as charismatic leaders that have fire in their belly. While in the past these parties heavily relied on anti-establishment platforms and communication rhetoric, their increasing elector...

The aim of this study was to explore social media, and specifically Twitter’s potential to generate a European demos. Our use of data derived from social media complements the traditional use of mass media and survey data within existing studies. We selected two Twitter hashtags of European relevance, # schengen and # ttip, to test several theories...

What are the effects of party defections on the attitudes of politicians who remain loyal to the party? We answer by combining multiple sources of data into a comprehensive novel data set on parliamentary party switching, to estimate how this affects the perceived distance between a politician and his party. Focusing on the theory of cognitive diss...

The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of in...

The article sheds light on two missing links in the existing literature on government’s policy preferences and policy choices, namely the roles played by party factions and trade unions as political actors able to affect government’s decision-making power. The content analysis of a wide typology of documents (i.e., investiture speeches, parliamenta...

Political economy suggests that media owners try to influence the process of media production by providing career incentives to like-minded journalists and adjusting the level of professional autonomy granted to them. Accordingly, we analyze whether the political distance between editors and journalists (i.e., reporters) affects the careers of jour...

This article analyzes 3 months of online debate during the electoral campaign for the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Through supervised sentiment analysis, we assess the extent of support for the referendum within the general public of Twitter users (Twittersphere) by analyzing the voting intentions expressed online in 2,369,333 tweets. Si...

The book provides a comprehensive view on the internal life of parties and investigates the dynamics of intra-party politics in different party environments to explain in which circumstances the party leader is more or less bound by the wills of party factions. Analyzing almost 500 intra-party documents from Italy, Germany and France, it presents a...

We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion toward the Islamic S...

Intra-party groups influence parties' policy priorities. However, scholars have yet to map the pathways with the greatest impact. We argue that party congresses serve as venues for decision-making, allowing speeches and motions to support differing priorities. Considering parties' internal process, we propose that deliberations and alternate motion...

Using a new supervised aggregated sentiment analysis algorithm (iSA), we analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when ISIS' strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of suppor...

The paper investigates party-union relationships in Italy (1946–2014) by hand-coding parties’ parliamentary speeches and trade unions’ congress motions. In line with the cartel party thesis, a time series analysis shows that the ideological closeness between the left-wing Italian General Confederation of Labour and left-wing parties deteriorated wh...

Does the interaction with the opinions of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ affect the behavior of politicians? So far, little attention has been devoted to the effect of social networking sites (SNS) on ‘hard politics’ choices. Focusing on two case studies related to Italian politics, namely the debate on the civil unions bill and the ‘Fertility Day’ cris...

This book illustrates how social media platforms enable us to understand everyday politics and evaluates the extent to which they can foster accountability, transparency and responsiveness. The first part focuses on accountability and tests whether the offline behavior of politicians is consistent with their online declarations, showing that textua...

Why does the government appeal for concertation? Starting from the principal‒agent framework and delegation theory, the article argues that the government is more willing to share decision-making power with trade unions when the policy preferences endorsed by the unions are closer to those of the cabinet. Furthermore, it maintains that government p...

Social media opinions, although expressed by generally more active citizenry, are emerging as an increasingly legitimate and influential form of public opinion. As social media allow to overcome the problem of hidden preferences and can favor political mobilization, these online opinions can also be linked with collective action. Accordingly, the p...

Chapter 9 highlights how the practice of ‘social TV’ and the analysis of the SNS audience can represent an innovative source of information on the degree of media pluralism. In fact, by analyzing the SNS audience’s reaction to media content, we can shed light on how media content is perceived and digested by the audience. This can allow the buildin...

Chapter 4 deals with the role of social media in the process of government formation. It analyzes the comments released on Twitter by politicians belonging to the PD, in order to record their distance from the party line. The results show that such distance has an effect on the politician’s career and emphasize the role of Twitter as a signal, sugg...

Chapter 6 tries to evaluate whether the pressure exerted through SNS affects the behavior of politicians. It investigates three case studies related to ‘hard politics’ choices, such as the pressure put on MPs through Facebook during the selection of the Italian Head of State in 2013, the decision of M5S representatives to defy the party leader duri...

Chapter 5 analyzes the comments published by politicians belonging to the three main Italian parties showing that such data allow us to draw inferences regarding their parliamentary behavior. The results of the statistical analysis highlight that politicians whose views are far from those of the party leader vote more often against the party line i...

Chapter 10 discusses the idea of SNS as a virtual public sphere. It also investigates the relationship between survey polls and sentiment analysis of SNS, discussing whether one day politicians will potentially ‘govern with sentiment’ (i.e., following the views of SNS users), transforming our political systems into a ‘sentiment democracy’. The pote...

Chapter 1 presents the theoretical framework of the book. It starts to discuss the transformation from the Web 1.0 to the Web 2.0 and 3.0, to investigate whether this can produce a revolution or, alternatively, politics will continue as usual. After reviewing the existing literature, this chapter proposes two different frameworks, based on the prin...

Chapter 7 takes into account the role of SNS in the field of public policy. Supervised sentiment analysis is used to monitor the evolution of the attitudes expressed by online public opinion in three different case studies concerning: the Italian labor market reform ‘Jobs Act’ (2014); the ‘€80 tax bonus’ (2014); the school reform ‘#labuonascuola’ (...

Chapter 2 presents the research design of the book, explaining the relevance of the Italian case, the selection of specific case studies addressed in the empirical chapters, and the choice of a wide time span, which allows the cumulative effect of innovation to be accounted for. It also provides details of the methodology, describing the main princ...

Chapter 3 proves that the statements published on social media can be analyzed profitably through automated scaling techniques of text analysis in order to map the intra-party structure of a party; it analyzes comments written by prominent factional leaders of the Italian Democratic Party to measure their ideological distance. Statistical analysis...

Chapter 8 introduces an index of online trust in political institutions, based on sentiment analysis, which has been continuously measured from 2012 to date. This index will be analyzed to establish whether the actions of policy-makers can affect online trust. Statistical analysis suggests that corruption scandals have negative effects, while polic...

The importance of social media as a way to monitor an electoral campaign is well established. Day-by-day, hour-by-hour evaluation of the evolution of online ideas and opinion allows observers and scholars to monitor trends and momentum in public opinion well before traditional polls. However, there are difficulties in recording and analyzing often...

The impact of corruption charges on the electoral performance of parties is conditioned by specific institutional factors. This article shows the extent to which the effects of political corruption depend on the control that party leaders exercise over the ballot. It is argued that voters might abstain or support other lists if they cannot select i...

Automated text analytic techniques have taken on an increasingly important role in the study of parties and political speech. Researchers have studied manifestos, speeches in parliament, and debates at party national meetings. These methods have demonstrated substantial promise for measuring latent characteristics of texts. In application, however,...

Going beyond source and content pluralism, we propose a two-dimensional audience-based measure of perceived pluralism by exploiting the practice of “social TV”. For this purpose, 135,228 tweets related to 30 episodes of prime time political talk shows broadcast in Italy in 2014 have been analyzed through supervised sentiment analysis. The findings...

Scholars have emphasized the need to deepen investigation of intraparty politics. Recent studies look at social media as a source of information on the ideological preferences of politicians and political actors. In this regard, the present article tests whether social media messages published by politicians are a suitable source of data. It applie...

We present iSA (integrated Sentiment Analysis), a novel algorithm designed for social networks and Web 2.0 sphere (Twitter, blogs, etc.) opinion analysis, i.e. developed for the digital environments characterized by abundance of noise compared to the amount of information. Instead of performing an individual classification and then aggregate the pr...

Motivated by the literature on ‘competing principals’, this article studies the effect of interactive social networking sites on the behavior of politicians. For this purpose, 12,455 comments posted on the Facebook walls of 423 Italian MPs have been analyzed to assess whether Facebook played a role in the selection of the Italian Head of State in 2...

The article explores the relationship between the incentives of parties to campaign on valence issues and the ideological proximity between one party and its competitors. Building from the existing literature, we provide a novel theoretical model that investigates this relationship in a two-dimensional multiparty system. Our theoretical argument is...

This article addresses the potential role played by social media analysis in promoting interaction between politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. We show that in a “Big Data” world, the comments posted online by social media users can profitably be used to extract meaningful information, which can support the action of policymakers along the polic...

The rise of Social Network Sites re-opened the debate on the ability of traditional media to influence the public opinion and act as agenda-setter. To answer this question, the present paper investigates first-level and second-level agenda-setting effects in the online environment by focusing on two Italian heated political debates (the reform of p...

Expo is the Universal Exhibition that the city of Milan hosted from May to October, 2015, under the theme: “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”. Nevertheless, if the big event is important for awakening the world's interest and attracting investment, much attention is dedicated to the “ Expo after Expo” phase, with the aim to keep alive the public...

This paper examines the changes in political language that occurred after 1989 in Italy and focuses on textual documents drafted by intra-party subgroups between 1946 and 2010 that were related to the internal debates of Italian political parties. These documents, which are addressed to party members and activists rather than the wider public, have...

This article demonstrates that, in a «Big Data» world, comments of social media users can be used to support the action of policy-makers across all the steps of the policy cycle. It applies a modern technique of Supervised Aggregated Sentiment Analysis to three public policies introduced in Italy from 2012 to 2014: the abolishment of the public fun...

Several scholars investigate the link between news media and political attitudes of citizens, showing that media exposure affects confidence in political institutions. Beginning from this perspective, we analyze trust in government in twenty-seven European countries, testing the interactive relationship between citizens’ policy views and media slan...

What is the relationship between Internet usage and political trust? To answer this question, we performed a cross-sectional analysis of Eurobarometer survey data related to 27 countries and a supervised sentiment analysis of online political information broadcast during the Italian debate on the reform of public funding of parties. The results dis...

Scholars agree that ideology affects judicial decision-making. We demonstrate that this proposition holds true even when the judiciary is independent of political control. Focusing on Italy (1983-2013), where the politicisation of the judiciary was an issue well before the entry of Berlusconi into politics, we estimate judicial orientations accordi...

Recent studies investigated the effect of e-campaigning on the electoral performance. However, little attention has been paid to the content of e-campaigning. Given that political parties broadcast minute-by-minute the campaign messages on social media, this comprehensive and unmediated information can be useful to evaluate the impact of different...

Media plays an important role in defining the quality of democracy in consolidated democracy. Internet, in turn, can wield effects on democracy and many scholars have investigated such relationship. Moving from this literature we use Eurobarometer data to estimate the effect of Internet on the satisfaction with the functioning of democracy among Eu...

This paper analyzes how factional conflict and intra-party organization affect a party’s likelihood of being involved in a ruling coalition. We focus on Italian parties (between 1946 and 2013) estimating their internal heterogeneity through quantitative text analysis of policy documents presented by factions during party congresses. The impact of i...

This chapter examines the coalition-bargaining process that took place after the 2013 elections. Using a hand-coding technique, we analyzed the parliamentary speeches released by parties, first in April, during the investiture debate of the Letta I Cabinet, and again in December, during the confidence vote on the Letta II Cabinet. In mapping the po...

The growing usage of social media by a wider audience of citizens sharply increases the possibility of investigating the web as a device to explore and track political preferences. In the present paper we apply a method recently proposed by other social scientists to three different scenarios, by analyzing on one side the online popularity of Itali...

This article investigates the dynamics of portfolio allocation within political parties to shed light on the patterns of conflict and cooperation between rival party factions. It provides a game-theoretic model that helps in explaining differences in portfolio allocation due to alternative modes of party organisation or party system competitiveness...

In recent years, there has been an increasing attention in the literature on the possibility of analyzing social media as a useful complement to traditional off-line polls to monitor an electoral campaign. Some scholars claim that by doing so, we can also produce a forecast of the result. Relying on a proper methodology for sentiment analysis remai...

La crescita esponenziale dei social media sta iniziando a giocare un ruolo sempre più centrale nella vita politica dei regimi democratici e non solo. I social media sono stati utilizzati, ad esempio, per organizzare dimostrazioni e rivolte durante la cosiddetta “Primavera Araba” (Cottle, 2011; Ghannam, 2011);1 per coinvolgere individui in varie for...

I precedenti capitoli hanno fatto luce sulle ampie potenzialità dei social media, in generale, e di Twitter in particolare, come fonti di informazioni che rendono possibile prevedere il presente nonché il futuro (ciò che abbiamo chiamato, rispettivamente, “nowcasting” e“forecasting”), anticipando il verificarsi di eventi sociali complessi o monitor...

Per capire cosa intendiamo per social media, per differenziarli al loro interno e, di conseguenza, per identificare quella particolare sotto-classe di social media su cui ci focalizzeremo in questo e nei prossimi capitoli, è utile iniziare la nostra trattazione introducendo un concetto molto più generale: quello di “reti sociali”. Per rete sociale...

La felicità (o happiness, usando un termine inglese) rappresenta una metrica sociale fondamentale che ha attratto una crescente attenzione in questi ultimi anni, ben al di là dei meri confini accademici. Basti pensare all’annuncio fatto nel 2009 dall’oramai ex Presidente francese Nicolas Sarkozy, seguito l’anno successivo dal neoprimoministro brita...

“Cosa ne pensano gli altri?” è da sempre la domanda fondamentale di chi ha l’onere di prendere decisioni o vuole capire quali siano stati gli effetti delle decisioni stesse o ancora di chi è interessato a conoscere a fini di studio (o di semplice curiosità). Per la quantità di testi digitali che se ne possono estrarre una miniera inesauribile di op...

As long as parties are interested in policies, they will always have incentives for influencing the cabinet bargaining process, although they do not necessarily shape its outcome to the same extent. Being a member of the invested government, for example, should increase the leverage a party enjoys when bargaining over the cabinet programme. Neverth...

This article investigates intra-party politics and explores the determinants of factional breakaways, going beyond the unitary actor assumption. It presents a game-theoretic model that focuses on intra-party competition and bargaining dynamics to analyse the interplay between party leaders and minority factions. It tests several hypotheses based on...

Sanctions and homogeneity of intra-party preferences are the two main pathways to party unity in roll-call votes. However, only a few works have managed to properly measure the degree of polarization within the party, and therefore the link between ideological preferences and parliamentary voting behaviour has not yet been fully tested. Looking at...

This work investigates the process of position-taking, focussing on the factional bargaining within the party. Exploiting two recently built datasets that estimated the policy positions of Italian parties and factions from 1946 to 2010, we investigate if and to what extent factions bind the party leader in choosing the platform. We find confirmatio...

Literature on party factions has investigated the elements that affect factionalism, and particularly the elements that affect the number of factions. Scholars raised a set of hypotheses that have never been systematically tested. Building on those hypotheses the present work analyzes the determinants of the number of factions within Italian partie...

To what extent does the party competition affect the judicial investigations against a member of the parliament? We argue that as the intensity of intra-party and inter-party competition increases, politicians have more incentives to denounce alleged malfeasance and crimes of their colleagues. In addition, we expect that, as the political competiti...

The growing usage of internet and social media by a wider audience of citizens sharply increases the possibility to investigate the web as a device to explore and track their (policy) preferences. In the present paper we apply the recent method proposed by Hopkins and King (2010) to three very different scenarios, by tracking on one side the on-lin...