Main Political Leaders Research Articles

The 2022 presidential election: what happened on Facebook?

ABSTRACT This article aims to retrace the main stages of the 2022 Italian presidential election through the messages spread within the Web environment. In particular, it investigates the digital communication on Facebook of the main political leaders and parties involved, as a privileged perspective from which to understand contemporary Italian politics. To achieve these objectives, the article is divided into three sections. First, it discusses the main challenges of presidential elections over the last twenty years, by observing how digital disruption has transformed their fundamental dynamics and political actors’ communication strategies. Second, it employs methodological approaches that are based on digital methods and content analysis to explore the digital discourse of both party leaders and their respective parties before, during and after the 2022 election. More specifically, it analyses how they used Facebook as a primary tool to inform and engage with both citizens and mainstream media, as well as to shape political bargaining. Overall, the article argues that, although Italy’s presidential race lacks any formal list of candidates, as the election is largely decided behind closed doors, the spread of digital platforms has to some extent brought the manoeuvring between political forces into public view introducing, to some extent, a new phase of campaigning. Finally, it shows how presidential elections in the Web environment have contributed to presidential personalization in Italy and explores complementary reasons why digital platforms have acquired a new centrality in the Italian political environment.

From Twitter to Instagram: evolution in the use of social networks in political communication. The case of the elections of the autonomous community of Madrid 2021.

Political communication in social media is a vital element in any modern electoral campaign. In the early days, the use of any social network or even a website was the norm, however, nowadays, all candidates participating in an election must be present in Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For this reason, the aim of this research is to analyze the impact of the main political leaders that ran for the presidency of the regional government of Madrid in these three major social media. To do so, a quantitative methodology, based in massive data collection is used, allowing for a precise approach to the impact of every candidate account in the studied social media platforms. As an initial conclusion, it can be highlighted that, even if Twitter is the preferred social media platform by politicians, Instagram is the one favorite by users.

Securing the Youth Vote: A Comparative Analysis of Digital Persuasion on TikTok Among Political Actors

In the context of “pop politics” and “politainment,” the irruption of TikTok has changed the landscape of social media and become the fastest-growing application among young people. Based on the peculiarities of the social platform’s affordances and the political personalization approach, we explore the differences between political parties and political leaders in terms of digital persuasion on TikTok in Spain and Poland. This work contributes to the scarce knowledge about the strategic use of TikTok for political purposes. It also attempts to fill the gap in the comparative research into the practical uses of TikTok in different political contexts. The study explores the three classical persuasion appeals—pathos, ethos, and logos—based on a visual, quantitative analysis of <em>N</em> = 372 videos posted on the official TikTok profiles of the main political parties and leaders from January 1st to March 31st, 2022. Differences were found in how political parties and political leaders used TikTok’s affordances as well as in the main rhetorical resource they use to persuade. We noted the use of more rational resources (logos) in the case of political parties and more emotional resources<em> </em>(pathos) for political leaders. Further, the rare presence of the personality in the videos of the political actors (ethos), along with their unusual privatization role, indicate that personalization on TikTok is far from being considered as part of their digital persuasion strategy.

Tiktok Content in Communication Strategy: Politics of the 15th General Election in Malaysia

Political communication is the exchange of the latest news between the government and society or vice versa. The purpose of political communication is to get support or votes from the people. Nowadays, social media is increasingly important in political communication because social media can be used by anyone interested without any limitations. Therefore, this study aims to examine the ability of TikTok as one medium of political communication strategy. This study looks at the extent by which the main youth political leaders in Malaysia optimize the use of TikTok as a political communication strategy, evaluates the adaptation of political leaders with TikTok in terms of content, identifies the type of interaction with TikTok users, evaluates the political communication strategies through TikTok and the effectiveness of TikTok use in influencing improvement political supporters ahead of GE-15. This study selected two TikTok accounts, namely Y.B. Syed Saddiq and Shahril Sufian Hamdan as a study sample. The results of the study indicated the significant advantage of Y.B Syed Saddiq in using TikTok as a political communication tool in comparison to Shahril Sufian Hamdan. The youth-friendly interaction demonstrated by Y.B. Syed Saddiq made him one of the most highly followed politicians with successful message sharing. Shahril Sufian Hamdan and other politicians should adapt to a new era in efforts to political communication. Politicians should use social media more effectively and post more friendly content to social media users and increase interaction activities with them. Keywords: content; Malaysia; politic; TikTok

Sub-state nationalisms in Spain during the Moroccan War and the Rif War (1909-1927)

This article analyses how the Spanish colonial wars in Morocco in the early 20th Century influenced Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalisms at an absolutely key moment in their development. It assesses the aftermath of the Versailles settlement and the new claims of colonial peripheries, which coincided with the Disaster of Annual in 1921, Spain’s great defeat in Morocco, which served as a weapon against the State for sub-state nationalisms, and led to the appearance of the Rif Republic, a benchmark in the anti Spanish fight. The article examines how the war was used to mobilize people against prevailing Spanish nationalism, the warmongering, colonialist, anti-war and anti-colonial discourses of the nationalisms in question and the positions of the main political parties and leaders. In short, it seek to measure the impact that this long and important war had on different Spanish national identities during the first decades of the 20th century.

Populism and emotions: Italian political leaders’ communicative strategies to engage Facebook users

Populist ideology and emotions are being increasingly adopted by political leaders as communicative tools to drive attention and gain consent. Populism appears to be intimately related to emotions due to its own emotional charge when appealing to the people or blaming ‘others’. Analysing the Facebook timelines of Italy's main political leaders during the 2018 general election campaign, we found that only negative emotions are associated to populist ideology although they are less frequently adopted by leaders. Emotional appeals, especially negative ones, emerged as a more successful strategy for triggering users’ interactions and reactions than populist ideology. Going negative appears to be the best strategy for gaining visibility on Facebook. Quite unexpectedly, love reactions are influenced by blaming the ‘dangerous others’, while angry reactions are not affected by the presence of populist references. Our results lead us to hypothesise that when emotions run high, populist ideology takes a slight step back.

Does populism go viral? How Italian leaders engage citizens through social media

ABSTRACT This study explores populism in terms of communication while distinguishing between its ideological and stylistic dimensions. We examine the social media communication of the three main Italian political leaders during the last national electoral campaign to underline the differences and similarities in their use of populist communication in terms of ideology and style and assess how it affects Facebook and Twitter engagement. Our analysis shows that the three leaders all adopt populist communication styles but in slightly different ways. In all cases, populist style elements have a stronger impact on online engagement than populist ideology. The main difference between social media seems to be related less to the leaders’ communication elements than to their platform-specific audiences’ positive reactions to populist communication strategies.

Suverenitet v Evrazijskoj integracii

The article analyzes the process of Three Horizons of Eurasian Integration. The authors consider the Eurasian Economic Community, the European Union and Belt and Road to be the main political, moral, economic and technological leaders in building a new world order. The global pandemic COVID‑19 made it clear that the Westphalian political system, based on the nation state and sovereignty, is still relevant and that it is the state that is able to cope with various types of crises.

«Убежден, что у нас гражданской войны не будет…». Встреча Б. Н. Ельцина с депутатами Ленсовета 22 марта 1991 г.

The publication is dedicated to staying Boris Yeltsin in Leningrad, March 22, 1991, and his meeting with the deputies of the Leningrad City Council XXI convocation. A transcript of Boris Yeltsin’s speech to the Leningrad parliamentarians in the Mariinsky Palace is being introduced into scientific circulation. The publication of the document was carried out according to the modern rules of archeography. The authors of most of the questions asked to Yeltsin have been identified, and reference information on their persons has been provided. The content of the meeting in the Leningrad City Council reflects the severity of the internal political crisis in the USSR on the eve of its collapse, when the rivalry between the main political leaders of the country: the President of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev and the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR B. N. Yeltsin became especially acute. The materials of the publication are of interest to specialists in the socio-political history of Russia at the end of the twentieth century.

Trajetória do Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro na Bahia

O presente artigo busca analisar a trajetória do trabalhismo e do Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, o PTB como um marco importante na condução de uma política de estado, aproximada das perspectivas das leis trabalhistas e na forma de organizar a classe trabalhadora. Esse trabalho também tem como mote discutir a presença da ideologia e do partido trabalhista no estado da Bahia, apontando a importância do partido no contexto da experiência democrática (1945-1964), identificando os principais dirigentes políticos e suas atuações políticas. Além disso, cabe ressaltar as crises instaladas dentro do PTB baiano, provocadas pelas divergências ideológicas e pelo modo de conduzir as alianças políticas com partidos que nem sempre convergiam com os princípios trabalhistas. Desse modo, as fontes jornalísticas e o diálogo com outras obras sobre o PTB, darão sustentação primordial para a análise desse campo da história política.

Anti-corruption protests, alliance system and political polarization

The fight against corruption has become, in recent years, one of the main international causes. Many studies have been done on the effects and consequences of corrupt and corrupting practices for the political system and for the general society. However, there are still few who are dedicated to analyzing the conditions and dynamics of the fight against corruption as a public and international cause and its consequences and impacts on national political systems. Therefore, the objective of this article is to examine the emergence and spread of anti-corruption movements and protests in Brazil, between 2013 and 2018. I aim to demonstrate that the emergence and development of anti-corruption protests and mobilizations in this period are related to the crisis and collapse of the “alliance system” between the main political leaders and organizations, becoming a political resource to recompose and change such alignments. This analysis shows the relevance of the “political dimension” to understand the process of emergence and the development of protests and mobilizations against corruption.

Different Twitter strategies of the main Spanish political leaders in the 2019 general elections of April (28A)

El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar el uso que hicieron de Twitter los cuatro principales líderes políticos españoles durante la campaña de las elecciones generales españolas desarrollada entre el 12 y el 26 de abril del 2019. Se analizó su timeline, tanto cuantitativo (de su participación), como cualitativo (categorizando el tono, la orientación o la temática abordada). El corpus de este estudio está compuesto por un total de más de 700 contenidos cuyos resultados evidencian: 1) la existencia de una estrategia de comunicación política en Twitter; 2) la interacción y dinamización del diálogo con diferentes estrategias e intensidad; 3) la autopromoción a través del propio texto, material audiovisual y enlaces compartidos con el ánimo de potenciar, principalmente, actividades propias de campaña; 4) un alto porcentaje de mensajes que no se corresponden con las preocupaciones de su público objetivo, aunque con diferencias existentes entre los candidatos. Queda demostrada la existencia de un uso estratégico de Twitter en el que aún existe un amplio margen para explotar el potencial interactivo y cuyo contexto electoral ha girado en torno a un monólogo promocional más próximo a sus agendas temáticas que a los temas de interés de su electorado.

Diferentes estrategias en Twitter de los principales líderes políticos españoles en las elecciones generales de 2019 (28A)

The objective of this paper is to explore the use made of the social network Twitter by the four main political leaders during the electoral campaign carried out between April 12 and April 26, 2019. Their timeline was analyzed, both quantitative (of their participation), and qualitative (categorizing the tone, orientation or theme addressed). The corpus of this study is composed of a total of more than 700 contents whose results show: 1) the existence of a political communication strategy on Twitter; 2) the interaction and dynamization of dialogue with different strategies and intensity; 3) self-promotion through the text itself, audiovisual material and shared links with the aim of promoting, mainly, campaign activities; 4) a high percentage of messages that do not correspond to the concerns of your target audience, although with differences between the candidates. The existence of a strategic use of Twitter is demonstrated in which there is still a wide margin to exploit the interactive potential and whose electoral context has revolved around a promotional monologue closer to its thematic agendas than to the subjects of interest of its electorate.

Leading a Successful Transition to Democracy: A Qualitative Analysis of Political Leadership in Spain and Lithuania

Any country embarking upon a political transition to democracy faces a complex period of change. While many factors influence successful democratization, political leadership remains a relatively unexplored phenomenon. This research presents a theoretical framework that is corroborated with data gathered from 65 semi-structured interviews with people involved in the transition processes of Spain and Lithuania along with the main political leaders themselves: King Juan Carlos I, Adolfo Suárez, Algirdas Brazauskas and Vytautas Landsbergis. The four leaders presented a similar political leadership style – based on their vision, decision-making, negotiation and power – which positively influenced the success of each transition to democracy.

Sailing Together or Ships Passing in the Night? India and the United States in Southeast Asia

Sailing Together or Ships Passing in the Night?India and the United States in Southeast Asia Walter C. Ladwig III (bio) and Anit Mukherjee (bio) keywords india, united states, southeast asia, security architecture [End Page 51] executive summary This article examines the significant congruence of U.S. and Indian interests in Southeast Asia and assesses both the prospects and constraints that New Delhi and Washington face in coordinating their policies toward the region. main argument Political leaders and analysts have described U.S.-India relations as a global partnership with the potential to shape the future security architecture of the Indo-Pacific. As is widely acknowledged, the two countries' extraregional interests align most closely in Southeast Asia. Accordingly, this article examines the potential for and limitations of U.S. and Indian cooperation in the region to achieve shared aims. Extensive diplomatic consultations between the two countries have led to a significant convergence in their positions on regional security challenges. Active cooperation, however, remains constrained by a number of factors, including India's need to prioritize foreign policy challenges closer to home, concerns about provoking China, and a discomfort among countries in Southeast Asia regarding the idea of a joint U.S.-India approach toward the region. Due to these limitations, U.S.-India policies in Southeast Asia are expected to continue to operate in parallel instead of becoming a joint endeavor. policy implications • The U.S. and India, which are at the initial stages of a cooperative approach to Southeast Asia, should intensify their diplomatic and military exchanges and establish a dedicated forum to share views and information on political and security developments in the region. • Strengthening the regional security architecture should be a major focus of Indo-U.S. efforts in Southeast Asia. In particular, they should concentrate on assisting the creation of a region-wide maritime domain awareness system, as well as working in parallel to develop the capacity of partner militaries. • Connectivity and infrastructure projects should be a renewed focus of Indian and U.S. efforts in the region, in partnership with like-minded third countries such as Japan. [End Page 52] The transformation in U.S.-India relations from alienation during the Cold War to a robust strategic partnership is one of the most significant geopolitical development of recent decades. In June 2017, at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's first meeting with President Donald Trump, the pair "resolved to expand and deepen the strategic partnership between the two countries and advance common objectives," most notably "promoting stability across the Indo-Pacific region."1 How likely is it that these two countries can actually cooperate and where is such cooperation most likely to happen? Across the subregions of the Indo-Pacific, Southeast Asia would appear to be an area where the transformation of Indo-U.S. strategic ties would have the most significant implications. For India, Southeast Asia is the most geographically proximate subregion and the focus of its efforts to both "look east" and "act east." For the United States, Southeast Asia historically has been a region where Washington's attention has ebbed and flowed.2 Under the Obama administration, however, both individual Southeast Asian nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as a whole received enhanced attention at the highest levels. A decade ago, the idea of the United States and India working together in Southeast Asia would have appeared far-fetched. Due to a growing recognition of the congruence of their interests in the region, however, the two countries are increasingly articulating common diplomatic positions on key security challenges. Most prominently, the joint statement made after the Modi-Trump summit in 2017 addressed the maritime disputes in the South China Sea and reiterated "the importance of respecting freedom of navigation, overflight, and commerce throughout the region."3 This high-profile diplomatic signal had been anticipated by some analysts who have long speculated about the close fit between the U.S. "rebalance" to Asia and India's "Act East" policy.4 Indeed, according to former U.S. defense secretary Ashton Carter, the United States focusing westward and India acting to its east have resulted in a "strategic [End Page 53] handshake" between the...

The Popularization of Political Communication

This article presents and adopts a new definition of the popularization of political communication, which is defined as a strategic communicative action through which political actors try to create new connections with those citizens who do not still know, follow and support them and to emotionally strengthen the political bond with their current sympathizers. Second, a comparative analysis of the Facebook pages of the main political leaders of 31 countries shows that the popularization of political communication is a relevant phenomenon on Facebook, while a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) indicates that the presence of a presidential system, a high digitalization of the media system, and a high level of trust in political institutions are three sufficient conditions for a “pop” communication on Facebook. Finally, the article identifies and discusses its main properties and development under the current hybrid media system.

Role of Tribes in Current Libyan Conflict

The article explores tribal aspect of Libyan policy. Cases of Warfalla and Tuareg tribal groups show an important role of tribal entities in modern Libya. In focus are activity of Social Council of Warfalla Tribes as an influential political actor with its own armed force and successful fight of Tuareg militias over control of huge El Sharara oilfield as well as their confrontation with Tubu tribal militias. The main sources for the research are information from such Internet-journals as Reuters, The Economist, Al-Monitor, The Libya Observer, etc. as well as reports from expert groups such as Country of Origin Information (COI) and Global Security. The research led to the conclusion that tribal political actors play an independent role in the process of civil confrontation in Libya. By the manipulation of loyalties and maneuvering among official political actors they protect their own kind of “hidden sovereignty” over territories and resources. Main political leaders of the country, Khalifa Haftar and Fayez al-Sarraj, are actually dependent on complicated mosaic of tribal interests which determines changing loyalties of tribal actors. At the same time tribal actors often have links over the borders of the state. Tuareg are fine example of this phenomenon, while Tuareg tribal militias are allied with armed tribal movements of their kinsmen in Mali and Niger. The case of Social Council of Warfalla Tribes appears to be very helpful example. The institutions of governance as well as network of alliances developed by tribal actors in fact create a spontaneous institutional alternative to a project of centralized nation-state in Libya. Representatives of these unofficial non-state institutions work in different social spheres on a grassroots level.

Not every day is Election Day: a comparative analysis of eighteen election campaigns on Facebook

ABSTRACTThis article shows how the presence of an election campaign affects the way in which the main political leaders of 18 countries communicate on Facebook. Findings indicate the presence of robust qualitative and quantitative differences between campaign and peace-time periods. More specifically, this comparative analysis points out that election campaigns have a positive effect on the frequency with which political leaders update their Facebook pages and on the personalization of political communication, while a negative effect is associated with the publication of posts about policy issues and with a negative rhetorical strategy. No effect has been discovered concerning the privatization of political communication on Facebook. Finally, independent t-test analyses and bivariate correlations denote a generalized process of homogenization, whereby there is no single main impulse which governs the different communicative choices taken by political leaders on Facebook as an Election Day approaches.

Define the populist political communication style: the case of Italian political leaders on Twitter

ABSTRACTIn the hybrid media system, many processes are reforming political communication: popularisation, disintermediation, personalisation, intimisation and of course populism. This study proposes an empirical definition of political communication style with the aim of identifying characteristics of the populist political communication style. Between 2015 and 2016, the Twitter timelines of the main political leaders in Italy were analysed for 16 months. Applying an MCA allowed us to identify two key factors that characterise the communication styles of leaders: (1) communication mode, comparing negative and positive; and (2) communicative focus, comparing personalisation and political/campaign. The intersection of these two factors resulted in four different political communication styles: ‘Engaging’, ‘Intimate’, ‘Champion of the people’ and ‘Man of the street’. The latter two were clearly characterised by the presence of populist ideology fragments and traits, but were not strictly related to the leaders’ ideological positions. This result supports the hypothesis that populist style is less and less connected to the right/left political cleavage, but rather the result of a varied combination of gradations that mix different individual aspects of the leader’s political communication style.

Leaders' ‘Green’ Posts. The Environmental Issues Shared by Politicians on Facebook

Is Facebook “green”? Do political leaders use this social medium to spread information on green policies? The aim of this paper is to investigate on whether and how Facebook is used by politicians as an arena to spread environmental policy proposals or simply information about the environment. The study covers 127 Facebook pages of political leaders in 31 different advanced industrial democracies. The 127 pages have been under observation for 26 months and 99,234 posts were scrutinized. 25,151 out of these 99,234 posts were manually coded and analyzed in order to measure how often contemporary leaders use Facebook to talk about environmental issues. We found that: (i) environmental issues do not represent a relevant concern for the main political leaders of contemporary advanced industrial democracies; (ii) left wing and younger leaders are the ones who used Facebook the most for spreading information about environmental issues; and (iii) relevant differences between leaders of countries with different levels of economic wealth and environmental pollution are noted in regard to Western countries.