The Use Of Twitter In 2013 Italian Political Election

The Italian political communication arena seems to have changed during 2013 Italian elections. On that occasion, many politicians have started to use social media, or to improve their uses, focusing their attention particularly on Twitter. In fact, Twitter was the main protagonist of the new communication environment (Bentivegna, 2014) and the most used by both, politicians and journalists. Nowadays, Twitter has become a fundamental part of institutional communication and it plays a central role within politicians’ image building. Nevertheless it is feasible to ponder on whether this change is a real innovative process inside Italian political communication. If it is true that Twitter represents a new possibility to build stronger relations with citizens and to find a neutral ground to express ideas and thoughts, it is also true, that it could be a new media used as an old one. The main goal of this paper is to investigate how Italian MPs, depending on their parties and political believes, have used Twitter during the last national elections. For this reason a research was developed by the department of Communication and New Technologies at IULM University in Milan. The study analysed a sample of 41 politicians from the principal electoral lists from January 2013 until the new government formation, in April 2013. The analysis was carried out using quantitative and qualitative methods, while data categorisation was done using Jakobson’s six functions of language (Jakobson, 1963). Moreover, by applying a narrative analysis it was possible to study in depth the kind of storytelling that Italian politicians developed on Twitter. This part of the research was useful to understand the actual usage that they performed and to comprehend which imagine of them they wanted to build through Twitter. According to our interpretation, the research has demonstrated a mainly unidirectional and top-down use of Twitter by the analysed sample, reproducing the mass-media logic of traditional political communication.