Moreno Mancosu

Moreno Mancosu
Verified
Moreno verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Moreno verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
  • PhD
  • Professor (Associate) at University of Turin

About

61
Publications
13,864
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
712
Citations
Current institution
University of Turin
Current position
  • Professor (Associate)
Additional affiliations
December 2019 - present
University of Turin
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
April 2018 - December 2019
University of Turin
Position
  • PostDoc Position
October 2015 - March 2019
Collegio Carlo Alberto
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (61)
Article
This study explores the interplay of imagery and text in online political communication by European party leaders. We examine how visual and textual components combine to convey emotions in Instagram posts published by one hundred twenty-four mainstream and populist leaders of one hundred fourteen parties in twenty-four EU countries, covering 3 mon...
Article
Full-text available
What are the characteristics of a political protest that enable it to win public support, and what is the role of the political environment? The literature has argued about the characteristics that induce the public to sympathize with protesters (such as the identity of the protesters, their demands, and their methods), but little research has focu...
Article
This paper examines the dynamics of perceived victimhood in the Italian political landscape, highlighting its correlation with political ideology, populism, and economic distress. Utilizing original survey data, we investigate how individuals' political alignment, particularly with far-right and populist parties, correlates with their sense of vict...
Article
Full-text available
Political misinformation is becoming an increasingly central topic in both public and academic debate. The main normative concern is that the diffusion of false political news might lead to distorted perceptions of the social and political reality. Indeed, existing research largely focuses on the determinants of public misinformation and the spread...
Article
This contribution aims at investigating the changes in visual communication by Italian political leaders on Instagram during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using a dataset including all the posts published by the main Italian political leaders from September 20th, 2019 to September 20th, 2020 (n = 6,865) and using face and emotional recogni...
Research
Full-text available
This working paper examined citizens' reactions to populism. It also verified whether anti-elite populist narratives have an impact on citizens' trust in politics and institutions. Additionally, the research investigated the success of populist content on Facebook by means of reactions. Given different purposes, this study relied on both quantitati...
Article
Full-text available
Academic research has shown that believing in conspiracy theories is common in contemporary democracies and that believing in such theories is particularly common in moments of crisis (such as wars, terrorist attacks, or pandemics). Scholars have attempted to understand the psychological and attitudinal elements that trigger conspiracism among the...
Article
Full-text available
Conspiracy theories are gaining increasing interest in academic and public debate. A broad research agenda focused on the socio-political and psychological determinants of conspiracy theory beliefs, on the effect of social media as a new channel of dissemination, on the role played by populist leaders in explaining those theories, and on the impact...
Article
Full-text available
Public opinion literature on conspiracy theories mainly focuses on individual and contextual factors predicting people’s beliefs in conspiratorial news. However, little research to date has considered the role of the source of the news, and its interaction with the news content, in explaining people’s receptivity to those narratives. By employing a...
Article
Full-text available
Research in political behavior shows that citizens update their past perceptions and future expectations over several phenomena depending on whether their favorite party wins or loses the elections. This bias is explained by different psychological mechanisms triggered by individuals' attachment and trust in political parties. In this paper we inve...
Article
Full-text available
The effects of news coverage on political attitudes in election campaigns have been widely studied in academic research. In particular, a fertile branch of the literature investigated the impact of news media negativity on turnout. To date, however, findings are mixed, precluding to state a clear relationship. This paper aims to shed a light on thi...
Article
Full-text available
Media are known to affect people’s political attitudes and behaviors. The literature has mainly tested whether media tone and visibility affect people’s attitudes toward leaders. However, only a few scholars have assessed these effects by considering the levels of attention requested by different media to understand the message. This paper investig...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Growing research focusing on citizens' psychological reactions to terrorism finds that attacks perpetrated by individuals belonging to Muslim minorities increase negative attitudes toward immigrants as a whole. We argue that this empirical regularity might be explained by stereotyping, which produces immediate emotional reactions among pe...
Article
Full-text available
General consensus concerning the nature of the relationship between political disagreement and turnout has not yet been reached: while several studies have demonstrated the demobilizing effect of disagreement, others have found no significant evidence for this. Recently, scholars have argued that diversity — a situation in which some people are in...
Article
Full-text available
In reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has restricted the access to its Application Programming Interface(API). This new policy has damaged the possibility for independent researchers to study relevant topics in political and social behavior. Yet, much of the public information that the researchers may be interested in is still av...
Article
Full-text available
The debate around political misinformation is gaining increasing relevance among the general and academic audience. If a large body of work is devoted to understanding the mechanisms of diffusion of inaccurate/false news contents (especially on social media), few studies have focused on the individual mechanisms by which people believe in those new...
Article
In 2018 Italian general elections, the Lega has dramatically increased its consensus in the ‘red belt’, the central area of the country traditionally ruled by centre-left parties. Pundits have argued that this performance can be attributed to the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, who changed the ideological location of the Lega by transforming it i...
Article
Recently, the literature has devoted increasing attention to beliefs in conspiracy theories. Among various aspects of the phenomenon, it was found that conspiratorial attitudes are associated with political behaviour. In Italy, previous research found that Five Star Movement and right-wing parties' voters tend to show higher levels of conspiratoria...
Article
Full-text available
In Italy, the Lega obtained outstanding electoral success in the 2019 European elections, becoming the first party on the political spectrum. Previous literature has argued that this performance can be attributed to the leadership of Matteo Salvini, who transformed the Lega from an ethno-regionalist party into a national right-wing party (Passarell...
Article
Full-text available
Interpersonal influence-the process by which people change their idea according to the ideas of others-is a crucial mechanism that forges political agreement among citizens. Previous research, however, focused on non-directional aspects of influence-namely, by testing whether disagreement with political discussants affects volatility in vote intent...
Article
The winner-loser electoral status may affect citizens' perceptions of the national economy. In the context of Europe, this issue has aroused little interest as multi-party competition makes it difficult to study. We look at the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, a top-down national referendum, which approximates second-order elections and divi...
Article
This article investigates the patterns of Europeanization of the Italian public sphere during the 2019 European Elections campaign. Europeanization is meant as a multifaceted process. The visibility and salience of the European Union (E.U.) within the public debate is realized by dynamics involving different actors, in terms of interactions, connec...
Article
Over the past years, an increasing number of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam and targeting civilians have taken place in several Western democracies, calling for more research on the impact of these exogenous events on citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. Using a quasi‐experimental approach, our study examines the short‐term eff...
Article
Interpersonal influence shapes political behavior and attitudes. So far, however, little efforts have been devoted to testing this mechanism comparatively in Europe. This paper aims at explaining differences in influence patterns in three European countries (Italy, Germany, and the UK). Based on works in demography, we argue that in Mediterranean c...
Article
The 2018 general elections represented a turning point in Italian politics because of the huge success of two populist parties: Five Star Movement and Salvini’s League. Italy was only the last, even if one of the most relevant, manifestation of a general trend: a number of populist formations have achieved electoral success in countries with differ...
Article
Full-text available
Previous studies have argued that voters’ attitudes of apathy and protest towards the Italian party system, triggered by the economic crisis of 2011, were exploited by Movimento 5 Stelle to increase its support in the 2013 Elections. However, little attention has been paid to the determinants of dissatisfaction that voters showed even before the so...
Article
Full-text available
A recurrent criticism concerning the use of online social media data in political science research is the lack of demographic information about social media users. By employing a face-recognition algorithm to the profile pictures of Facebook users, the paper derives two fundamental demographic characteristics (age and gender) of a sample of Faceboo...
Data
Distribution of differences between real and predicted age (from a subsample of the WIKI dataset, n = 1,000). Although previous research [25] has tested the level of precision of CNN algorithms by employing images with known age and gender, concluding that the tolerance levels (estimated with a mean square error) are around 5-7 years for age and ov...
Data
Average age (left panel) and gender proportions (right panel) by party/leader considered. (EPS)
Data
Models’ estimates of S2 Fig. (PDF)
Data
Descriptive statistics of the datasets employed. (PDF)
Data
Models’ estimates of Fig 5. (PDF)
Data
Datasets employed in the article. (ZIP)
Article
Full-text available
In online surveys, the control of respondents is almost absent: for this reason, the use of screener questions or “screeners” has been suggested to evaluate respondent attention. Screeners ask respondents to follow a certain number of instructions described in a text that contains a varying amount of misleading information. Previous work focused on...
Preprint
Full-text available
In 2018 national elections, the Lega, an Italian xenophobic right-wing party, has dramatically increased its consensus in the ‘red belt’, the central part of the country traditionally ruled by center-left parties. Pundits have argued that this performance can be attributed to the effect of the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, who shifted the ideol...
Article
This paper clarifies whether and to what extent populist communication could drive different gender-oriented reactions. We adopted an original research design intending Facebook as a natural environment where investigating the interaction between social media users and populist and non-populist parties. Our case selection considers three countries...
Preprint
Full-text available
Growing research focusing on the psychological reactions to terrorism by citizens finds that terrorist attacks perpetrated by individuals belonging to Muslim minorities increase negative attitudes towards those perceived as the "outgroup", and especially immigrants and refugees. However, few attempts have been made so far to assess the short-term i...
Article
Full-text available
Previous studies have stressed that parties that (harshly) blame or criticize the political/economic elite affect citizens’ negative emotions and, in turn, populist attitudes and participation. It has also been shown that populist parties and movements massively employ these strategies in order to emotionally affect citizens. The literature, howeve...
Book
Contrary to commonly held theories of political behavior in Europe, the political environment, intended as the interaction of interpersonal communication among peers and spatio–temporal contexts, plays a crucial role in influencing individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors. This book’s analysis makes a number of contributions, showing the effe...
Article
Context is usually employed to explain voting behaviour, but the way in which it affects people remains obscure. Previous studies have stressed that awareness of the context might indirectly account for political environments’ influence. People aware of their context are expected to be more affected by the relative prevalence of party supporters in...
Article
Full-text available
Nelle survey online, per rispondere alla mancanza di controllo sull’intervi- stato, si è diffuso l’utilizzo di domande screener per valutare l’attenzione che i soggetti pongono nel rispondere al questionario. Per superare con successo una domanda scree­ ner, un intervistato deve seguire istruzioni inserite all’interno di un testo che contiene una q...
Article
Full-text available
Interpersonal influence—the process by which people change their idea according to the ideas of others—is a crucial mechanism that forges political agreement among citizens. By using data from the 2009 German Longitudinal Election Study short-term campaign panel, it will be tested how this strategy contributes to changing citizens’ ideas in the pro...
Article
Beliefs in conspiracy theories have attracted significant international media attention in recent years. This phenomenon has been studied in the US but while anecdotal evidence suggests it is also widespread among the Italian public, little evidence has been collected to assess it empirically. Using data from a 2016 survey, this pioneering study of...
Article
Full-text available
Mechanisms that are known to forge political agreement include interpersonal influence—the process by which people change their ideas according to others' attitudes—and selection—people's choice of their discussants according to their discussants' preferences. Using data obtained from a longitudinal survey, we test how these two processes contribut...
Article
Recently, the social sciences have witnessed a rising interest in dyadic design, as an efficient way to disentangle mechanisms of interpersonal influence. Despite the relevance of this design to political research, few efforts have been made to collect and efficiently analyze dyadic data. In this article, we suggest the Actor-Partner Interdependenc...
Article
Local and national effects in the electoral cycle: the case of Italy, 2001–2009. Territory, Politics, Governance. According to electoral cycle theory, in second-order elections small parties are expected to improve their performance, while big parties are expected to be punished. This paper formally tests whether these electoral cycle effects can b...
Article
Full-text available
Drawing on seminal work by Nazio and Blossfeld (Eur J Popul 19(1):47–82, 2003) and Di Giulio and Rosina (Demogr Res 16(14):441–468, 2007), this paper tests whether the recent spread of cohabitation in Italy has followed the typical pattern of diffusion of innovation processes. In doing so, we contribute to the debate on the determinants of the emer...
Article
Previous research demonstrated that different contextual sources can affect voting behavior. Homogeneous familiar networks affect individual behavior of people embedded in these networks toward voting for certain parties. Moreover, being exposed to higher levels of homogeneity in the geographical place where one lives contributes to developing high...
Article
The article aims to analyze the development of the propensity to vote for a new populist party, Movimento 5 Stelle (the 5 Star Movement, M5S), during the campaign for the 2013 Italian general election. The party, headed by a former comedian, Beppe Grillo, gained 25% of valid votes in the election, thus becoming the largest party in the Italian poli...
Article
The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between political involvement (namely, interest in political issues) and context in explaining voting behaviour with regard to the Northern League (NL), an Italian regionalist party. The basis of the paper’s theoretical argument is the differentiation between core (or more attentive) and peri...

Network

Cited By