Which topics dominated digital public discourse in the 2018 Italian Elections?
After the US Election in 2016, Facebook’s credibility as a democratic platform has declined - indeed, as Mashable reported, Facebook could even hurt democracy. Their algorithms allowed fake news to disseminate throughout the social network and therefore arguably influence the results of the election. While the Facebook platform has been useful in the past for democratic expression and protests – as seen, for instance, in the Arab Spring – it at the same time risks undermining democracy by presenting to users the same point of view and information. This so-called “filter-bubble” stems from the fact that the user’s experience on Facebook is highly personalized through algorithms. As the Harvard professor Cass Sunstein reported to Mashable, “while personalization initially sounds like a positive effort, […] feeding people a single perspective has the potential to be extremely dangerous, even leading to extremist viewpoints and group polarization”. Because of this mechanism, users would in fact only see posts and comments that are very close to what they like. For this reason, if there is no clarity on the different viewpoints, there cannot be and informed and democratic discussion.
Since Facebook has proved to be a poor democratic platform for the 2016 US Elections, we decided to test it for the 2018 Italian Elections. Specifically, we examined the comments that users would leave on the posts of the Facebook Page of three of the most prominent candidates of this election: Matteo Renzi from the Democratic Party, Luigi di Maio from the Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini from the Northern League. As it will be explained in the following section “Context”, the three politicians had very different views and campaigns for the 2018 elections. The fragmentation of the political scene has, in fact, been confirmed by the results and the lack of coalition to lead the country.
Through our study, we hope to discover if the users’ comments reflect the topics covered during the campaigns and if they represent the candidates’ points of view. The use of comments for support towards the favorite candidate and for discouragement of the opposition could be a sign that Facebook comments might not be useful for developing an informed debate.
Italian parliamentary elections are held once every five years to determine the political party or coalition which represents the necessary majority to agree confidence to the executive.
The latter is composed by a cabinet of ministers (Consiglio dei Ministri), chaired by the Prime Minister.
The new electoral law, called ‘Rosatellum’, combines elements of a British-style first-past-the-post system with the more continental proportional representation (PR). Just over a third of seats in each chamber is decided by winner-takes-all votes in individual constituencies. The rest is allocated in proportion to the number of votes each party receives, more or less.
More specifically, the electoral system of the national Parliament is regulated by the Consolidated Law on the election to the Chamber of Deputies (Presidential Decree no. 361/1957) and by the Consolidated Law on the election to the Senate (Legislative Decree no. 533/1993). The present Parliament enacted a reform of the system through Law no. 165/2017, introducing a mixed electoral system that includes both single-member districts - to be allocated by means of a majority system - and multi-member districts - allocated through a proportional system. The provisions regulating the election of 12 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 6 Senators in the Overseas Constituency remain unchanged, according to Law no. 459/2001.
The main features of the new electoral system are described below.
With regards the Chamber of Deputies, the national territory is divided into 28 constituencies. For some constituencies, the territory coincides with the entire Region, whereas in other cases the regional territory is divided into several constituencies (2 in Piedmont, 4 in Lombardy, 2 in Veneto, 2 in Lazio, 2 in Campania, 2 in Sicily).
Each constituency is divided into single-member districts, and in one or more multi-member districts.
The 232 single-member districts of the national territory are distributed in each constituency on the basis of the population. In each district, the candidate obtaining the highest number of votes is elected.
The allocation of the remaining seats is made through a proportional method: each constituency is divided into multi-member districts, made up of the territorial aggregation of neighbouring single-member districts, each one being generally allocated a number of seats ranging between three and eight.
As regards the Senate, the national territory is divided into 20 constituencies corresponding to the territory of each Region. Every regional constituency is divided into single-member districts and in one or more multi-member districts. The national territory is divided into 116 single-member districts.
Multi-member districts are made up of the territorial aggregation of neighbouring single-member districts, each one being generally allocated a number of seats ranging between two and eight.
The definition of single-member districts – as well as multi-member districts – depends on a legislative delegation to be enforced 30 days before the coming into force of the Law, upon parliamentary opinion, on the basis of the criteria and the guiding principles provided for by the law.
Each voter may cast one vote in a single ballot paper, bearing the name of the candidate in the single-member district and the electoral symbol of each list; in case of coalition lists, ballot papers shall include the electoral symbols of such lists, besides the names of the candidates – from two to four – in the multi-member district. Split voting (voto disgiunto) is not allowed.
Each vote is cast by marking the rectangle containing the electoral symbol of the list and the name of the candidate in the multi-member district. The vote is validly cast to the list and to the candidate in the single-member district. In case the mark is put on the name of the candidate to the single-member district only, the vote shall however be valid in favour of the list and for the election of the candidate in the single-member district; in case of several lists within a coalition, the votes will be distributed among the coalition lists proportionally to the votes obtained by each of them in the single-member district.
The procedures on how to cast votes are also described in the outer part of the ballot paper.
In single-member districts seats are allocated to the candidate receiving the highest number of votes validly cast; in case of a tie, the youngest candidate is elected.
As regards the seats to be allocated to the lists and coalitions of lists in multi-member districts, the allocation is performed at a national level for the Chamber of Deputies, through a proportional method, among the coalitions of lists and the lists exceeding the election thresholds.
The threshold to access the allocation of seats is 3% of the votes validly cast at a national level for single lists, and 10% of the votes validly cast at a national level for coalitions,
provided that at least one of the lists of the coalition obtained 3% of the votes validly cast at a national level (the threshold for inter-coalition lists is 3% of the votes validly cast at a national level, also in case the coalition does not reach the 10% threshold). As far as coalitions are concerned, the votes obtained by the lists not exceeding the threshold of 1% will not be taken into account.
With regards the Senate, the seats to the lists are allocated at a regional level through the proportional method. The threshold to allocate the seats is set – as it happens with the Chamber of Deputies – at 3% of the votes validly cast at a national level for individual lists, and 10% for coalitions, provided that at least one of the lists in the coalition obtains 3% of the votes validly cast nationally or 20% in a Region (the threshold for inter-coalition lists is in any case 3% of the votes validly cast at a national level or 20% of the valid votes in at least one Region, even in case the coalition does not reach the threshold of 10%). As far as coalitions are concerned, the votes obtained by the lists not exceeding the threshold of 1% will not be taken into account. The allocation of regional seats to the Senate also involves the lists – either individual or in coalition – that obtained at least 20% of votes validly cast in at least one Region.
Special provisions protect the lists representing recognised linguistic minorities standing for elections in a Special Autonomous Region whose statutes or relevant laws provide for particular protection of such minorities.
In the particular case of Valle d’Aosta, where one seat to the Chamber of Deputies and one seat to the Senate are allocated, special provisions are in force for the election in both chambers of Parliament: a single-member district is established for the election to the Chamber of Deputies and to the Senate, where the candidate obtaining – through the majority method – the highest number of votes validly cast is elected.
Italians were summoned to the polls on March 4, 2018 in order to elect their new representatives.
More than 20 parties were in the ring, but Italian voters were largely split into three political camps. The center-left coalition, dominated by Renzi’s Democratic Party and including smaller parties - such as Emma Bonino’s radical party ‘More Europe’; The Five-Star Movement - led by 31-year-old Luigi Di Maio. The party has ruled out entering coalitions with other parties in the past. A right-wing bloc, mainly constructed by Berlusconi’s ‘Forza Italia’, Salvini’s ‘Northern League’ and Meloni’s ‘Brethrens of Italy’.
According to CNN, jobs, the economy and security remained major concerns for voters, but one issue has dominated the pre-election debate: immigration. More than 600,000 people have arrived by sea from North Africa since 2013 when Italy last went to the polls, including 114,000 in 2017, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration. And the debate over immigration has highlighted tensions ahead of the vote. Right-wing parties have pushed an anti-immigration agenda, including the Northern League, which has advocated for mass expulsions and pledged to put “Italians first.” Berlusconi has warned that the number of migrants in Italy has caused “serious social alarm,” and vowed to deport more than 600,000 undocumented migrants. Similarly, the populist Five-Star Movement remained an ambiguous stance about immigration, thus leading some commentators to advocating a possible convergence between Di Maio’s and Salvini’s narratives.
Italy’s general election left the country with a hung parliament in which no single party or coalition commands an overall majority, leaving few options to form a government. As both Berlusconi’s and Renzi’s parties underperformed - although the latter ended up being considered as ‘the great defeated’, thus resigning from the Democratic Party’s Secretariat - the prospect of a grand coalition between these two forces is no longer feasible. Rather, the results left the populist Five-Star Movement (M5S) and the far-right League party in the driving seat as the country looks to cobble together a government with a working majority. Indeed, in a stinging defeat for Berlusconi, the anti-immigrant League party headed by Matteo Salvini emerged as the strongest movement within the coalition, taking almost 18 percent of the vote compared to Berlusconi’s 14 percent.
As of today - May 9, 2018 - there is no clear majority. Parties have insofar proven unable to find any workable middle ground to set up a government. Therefore, President Sergio Mattarella could choose to leave in place the current centre-left government of Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. This would allow time to set up a temporary government to reform the electoral law and organise new elections.
Blei, D. M. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM, 5, 77–84.
Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993–1022.
Camera dei deputati. (2018). XVIII Legislatura. Retrieved May 9, 2018, from http://www.camera.it/leg18/1
DiMaggio, P., Nag, M., & Blei, D. (2013). Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture: Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding. Poetics, 41(6), 570–606. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2013.08.004
Gallucci, N. (2018, January 22). Facebook’s taking a deeper look at how social media effects democracy. Retrieved May 9, 2018, from https://mashable.com/2018/01/22/facebook-social-media-bad-for-democracy/