Gender roles, perspectives, and issue attention in the Italian political twitterverse. An analysis of politicians’ network and top-down communication

Abstract

ABSTRACT We investigate gender disparities in politics through an exploration of the Italian political Twitterverse. Using network analysis and structural topic models on a novel dataset of Italian politicians’ tweets (January 2020 - February 2022), we find that women are as well-connected to their political peers and as active as their male colleagues, and tweet on a wide range of topics emphasizing the sub-issues they care the most. These findings indicate that, as for women’s positioning within the politicians’ network, their activism and issue attention, Twitter seems to be a more favorable environment than more conventional arenas, where numeric under-representation, appointment to marginal positions, and gender gaps in issue attention are still detectable.