Communicative Patterns across Cinque Stelle’s Party Platforms in the 2012 Primaries

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Francesco Bailo, whose focus is on the Italian Five Star Movement, or M5S. This was a disruptive political movement launched by comedian Beppe Grillo, and this study examined its activities across five platforms: Grillo’s blog, Meetup.com, the M5S Forum, Facebook, and the movement’s e-voting platform which was used to select electoral candidates. The focus here is on 2012 primary elections in the party.

The focus here is on the visibility and associability affordances of these platforms; visibility enables users and their content to see and be seen within a social media platform, while associability enables them to connect and be connected wth each other. This might be at the local as well as global level, through strong and/or weak ties, and can be understood in terms of overall communication orientation, affordances, and outcomes. Communication orientation, in particular, may be top-down or horizontal.

Platforms are likely to be used differentially in this; this is also likely to produce a fragmentation of platform use by the movement; and certain practices and users may be especially central here. This can be examined through topic modelling, network analysis, and other tools.

Visibility at the local level can be measured through link reciprocity (are connections reciprocal?); at the global level through standard deviation of in-degree distribution (are there very central participants?).

This finds Meetup.com and Forum to enable local and horizontal communication; the blog and Facebook to enable global and top-down communication across the movement. Users are largely active on only one of these platforms, though; there is only limited movement across them – candidates, however, move much more frequently across all platforms. Forum and Meetup are more centrifugal here – users move out to other platforms from here more often. Topic modelling also points to a topic fragmentation across the platforms that emerges from this. There were no centripetal tendencies, such as closeness to the movement leadership.

These affordances seemed not to affect party primary results particularly strongly, though: gender, the presence of party logos in profile images, screen position, and age were substantially more important in predicting the ranking of candidates. There are moderate effects from the platform affordances, though. Meetup was most important in this; engagement on this and other horizontal platforms might have helped somewhat – but the design of the voting platform itself seemed to play the greatest role in vote results.