Vol. 86 No. 1 (2023): The 2022 Italian general election
Articles

A midsummer night’s dream: political communication during the Italian 2022 electoral campaign

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  • Arturo Bertero,
  • Gaetano Scaduto
Arturo Bertero
University of Milan
Gaetano Scaduto
University of Milan-Bicocca
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-14224

Published 2023-06-12

Keywords

  • Italian Elections,
  • Political Communication,
  • Social Media,
  • Legacy Media,
  • Electoral Campaign

How to Cite

Bertero, A., & Scaduto, G. (2023). A midsummer night’s dream: political communication during the Italian 2022 electoral campaign. Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES), 86(1), 13–28. https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-14224

Copyright (c) 2023 Arturo Bertero, Gaetano Scaduto

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

By adopting a political communication perspective, this article describes the Italian electoral campaign of 2022. First, we reconstruct the coalition formation phase and discuss the issues at the center of the electoral campaign. Second, we describe the communicative macro-frames at the heart of the political strategies of Italian political actors and how these macro-frames are used to campaign on more specific issues. Third, we delve into the hybrid communication strategies of Italian politicians. To do so, we integrate the analysis of legacy media, showing their enduring centrality, and that of social media. We conclude that the 2022 election was marked by many novelties, such as the unusual national summer campaign, the massive use of Instagram, and the introduction of TikTok in the parties’ communication strategies. At the same time, elements of continuity were present, such as leaders’ reliance on traditional media and the high political instability forcing the Italian political system to intense and hurried electoral campaigns.

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