Mauro Barisione

• PhD
• Professor at University of Milan

In recent years, the Front National, under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, has experienced a political revival. In elections, membership numbers and public opinion polls, the party has made impressive gains. We argue in this article that these gains stem, at least in part, from a strategic repositioning of the party based on a more populist discou...

Previous work on nonverbal cues has demonstrated the influence of candidates’ facial displays on voter preferences. However, the idea that visual cues affect political judgment by signaling the relative social solidarity (in-group vs. out-group status) between candidates and voters has received little attention. We fill this gap by experimentally m...

An under-investigated yet exemplary form of political polarization in the mass public is the so-called “partisan gap in leader support.” By providing an original analysis of two non-U.S. contexts—the 2013 German and Italian general elections—we show that the simple act of voting for a party involves partisan-motivated reasoning, that is, evaluation...

Do leaders make a difference? Are national political candidates and their public images influential in shaping voter choice and in determining election outcomes? Scholarly literature on “leader effects” tends to be discordant when assessing the impact of leader images on voting. This suggests that we should reframe the question in “conditional” ter...

More than a century after Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, the idea of charisma is still commonly associated with a leader’s personal qualities. This personalistic and—as I argue—simplistic understanding of the Weberian theory of charisma was perpetuated, especially in leadership studies, during the twentieth century by political scientists, social p...

Contrary to the cliché that our age is post-ideological, this book contends that political ideologies are part of the logic itself of modernity and continue to permeate ’hyper-modern’ politics. Using a multitude of primary sources (texts) and data, the author identifies the ‘polar stars’ – guiding principles such as order, freedom and equality – ar...

In this research note, a specific aspect of public reactions to the pandemic is investigated, namely, the extent and conditions under which dramatized communications about the country’s situation can trigger support for government measures aimed at countering the pandemic. The research question is whether dramatized communication frames that emphas...

When the immigration issue has been strongly politicized, prejudice toward minority out-groups can be profoundly imbued with politics, to the point that citizen responses to partisan cues about immigrants tend to operate on the basis of a ‘political sympathy/antipathy bias’. This article demonstrates that there is a direct causal relation between t...

The use of survey experiments has been expanding remarkably over the last two decades, especially in social psychology and political science, in the fields of public opinion and communication research. By combining - at least potentially - the internal validity of experiments and the external validity of population- based surveys, experimental surv...

The disappearance of class voting in post-industrial societies has often been announced in recent decades. Few studies, however, have focused on the self-employed, an occupational category which tends to combine the properties of a social class and a status group. The UK, Italy, and Spain present different traditions but similar levels of class vot...

Recent work on digital political engagement has extensively shown that social media platforms enhance political participation and collective action. However, the idea that citizen voice through social media can give rise, under given conditions, to a specific digital force combining properties of social movements and public opinion has received les...

As the European Union has expanded its power, it is also subject to more contestation and politicisation, and thereby struggling for more legitimacy. The mass media are traditionally key channels for opinion formation and processes of democratic legitimacy. We should now also look at social media platforms as a communication space in which politica...

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...

This article analyses subjective union membership among employees and non-employees in Italy between 1972 and 2013. Unlike trends drawn from administrative data (objective membership), subjective membership, based on respondent's declaration, takes into account respondents’ awareness of being affiliated to a union, sense of belonging, and social de...

Gender and race biases persist in western democracies, with male and white candidates still being the norm. Voters may be more inclined to express sexist and racist attitudes in countries with a traditionally male-dominated political system and a majority-white population. As sexism and racism are notoriously difficult to document, and because many...

Gender and race biases persist in western democracies, with male and white candidates still being the norm. Voters may be more inclined to express sexist and racist attitudes in countries with a traditionally male-dominated political system and a majority-white population. As sexism and racism are notoriously difficult to document, and because many...

Political leadership is a process that involves at least one person aspiring to rule a country, party, or other organization, and a large group of followers. Being based on a mixture of coercion and discourse, political leadership places special emphasis on communicative forms of persuasion such as visions, slogans, images, and frames. The communic...

In 2004, the term « Radical Right Gender Gap » was coined to capture the greater reluctance of women to vote for these parties in Europe (Givens, 2004). Several lines of explanation were put forward: women were more educated, less exposed by the types of jobs they held to competition with immigrants, less supportive of political violence and extrem...

In the increasingly diversified environment of political communication, leaders’ popularity may rest not only on the voters’ main sources of political information, but also on the degree of congruence between leader and media communication styles and requirements. Using ITANES Rolling Cross Section (RCS) CAWI survey, conducted on a sample of 8.700...

In the increasingly diversified environment of political communication, leaders’ popularity may rest not only on the voters’ main sources of political information, but also on the degree of congruence between leader and media communication styles and requirements. Using ITANES Rolling Cross Section (RCS) CAWI survey, conducted on a sample of 8.700...

Se le si analizza alla luce del ruolo giocato dai leader di partito, le elezioni politiche del 2013 hanno presentato aspetti tanto di continuità quanto di rottura rispetto al passato. Come nelle cinque elezioni politiche precedenti dal 1994, la principale forza del centrodestra ha avuto alla sua guida Silvio Berlusconi, mentre al centrosinistra si...

In recent years, electoral studies and public opinion research have started disputing the notion of a traditional gender gap€™, which cast women in Western democracies as being politically less participant, ideologically more conservative and more often voting for right-wing parties than men. However, evidence of an emerging €modern gender gap€™ €“...

Among both scholars and practioners, the critical importance of framing processes in the realm of deliberative democracy has been neither formally acknowledged nor adequately studied so far. The purpose of this theoretical article is to craft and define the analytical concepts and methodological tools necessary to shed light on this complex relatio...

L a démocratie italienne des vingt dernières années a souvent été présentée comme une sorte de laboratoire politique, au sein duquel certaines tendances communes aux démocraties contemporaines se manifestaient dans leur expression la plus extrême. Dominée par la figure centrale de Silvio Berlusconi qui fut, à plusieurs reprises, soit Premier minist...

A few weeks before 2006 general elections in Italy a high proportion of voters declared that they were still undecided about their vote. Based on panel and rolling cross section data collected within the 2006 ITANES program, the present paper analyses some feature of the decision process of these undecided voters. The comparison between this group...

The principles of selection of national candidates and contenders for political leadership are becoming increasingly standardised in Western contemporary democracies, which have been affected by two widespread processes: first, the growth of mass political communication via the electronic media; and second, the increasing deficit of perceived legit...

Introduzione Si sa che ogni elezione ha una storia a sé, fatta di un groviglio di fattori che concorrono a definirne l'esito. Così, i fattori di lungo periodo legati per esempio alla geografia elettorale o alle appartenenze sociali si attorcigliano con i fattori congiunturali, quali la strategia comunicativa di una coalizione o l'immagine di un lea...

Introduzione In un sistema d'alternanza, un tipico esito elettorale è quello in virtù del quale il partito o la coalizione vincente accede alle funzioni di governo grazie ad un margine di voti esiguo, sufficiente tuttavia a fare la differenza rispetto alla coalizione avversaria e, magari, rispetto al proprio risultato delle elezioni precedenti. Se,...