Motions Of Stars Research Articles

How cyber political brands emerge: a socio-material analysis of the Italian Five Star movement and the Czech pirate party

Purpose Although information technology has been at the centre of attention of political branding for some time, research has traditionally focused mainly on its role in the facilitation of communication. This paper aims to unpack the role of information technology in the emergence of new cyber political brands. Design/methodology/approach This research uses a dual case study approach that focuses on the relationship between branding, politics and information technology. The analysis focuses on two successful political cyber brands: the Italian Five Star Movement and the Czech Pirate Party. Data collection covering the time frame between their emergence and their political success occurs through netnographic methods. Findings Cyber political brands emerge and materialize in different forms. The present analysis allows for a delineation of three conceptual elements that characterize the constitutive interrelationship of information technology in the emergence of cyber political brands. The first conceptual element, organization, refers to how political brands become structured around linked activities. The second conceptual element, orientation, describes how the activities of a political brand are directed to build a specific path and legitimize courses of action. The third conceptual element, operation, delineates the processes that anchor and stabilize the political brands in its “own” culture, establishing specific base activities. Research limitations/implications Information technology and the techno-culture emerging around the two cyber party brands can be seen as the possible delineations of new “cleavages” in the form of “information technology-culture” which enables potential electoral success. Originality/value The present study by offering the conceptualization of the cyber political brand shows how political brands can reflect a type of performative cultural branding where they become able, as a networked-medium, to assemble a specific techno-culture. In terms of political brand development, the current analysis offers a framework that allows us to consider the process of political party development in a new fashion.

Inequality and voting in Italy’s regions

ABSTRACT In the last 20 years Italy has experienced major political upheavals, which have been explained by a variety of political and social processes. This paper analyses the role played by economic conditions in a period of stagnation and widespread impoverishment. The evolution of voting in Italy’s general elections from 1994 to 2018 is investigated at the regional level, exploring the role of inequality, changes in incomes, wealth levels and the precarization of jobs and unemployment. Using a novel regional database combining voting results, incomes of employees, and household revenues and wealth, we explore the drivers of non-voting, and of the shares of votes for mainstream parties, the Lega, and the Five Star Movement in the total number of electors. The results of our econometric models show that inequality, lack of wealth and precarization are closely associated with the regional patterns of Italy’s electoral change. While political, ideological and cultural variables are important factors in Italy’s political upheavals, we find that a key played has been played by inequality and economic conditions.

Il radicamento territoriale dei candidati nei collegi uninominali alle elezioni politiche del 2018

Among the attributes of political candidates, localness represents an aspect relatively uncovered by the core of the literature on party politics. There are, however, different scholars that pinpointed to the utility of this aspect in understanding political elites’ circulation. In line with this assumption, the article aims to map the degree of localness of single-member constituencies’ candidates in the 2018 Italian general elections. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the candidates’ localness by highlight similarities and differences among party-candidates and their geographical distribution. In doing so, the analysis is based on an original dataset; the localness of candidates has been calculated through a localness index. The article is organized as follows. It starts from a literature review on localness. Drawing on this theoretical introduction, I identify the logic behind the research question. In the next section, the rationale for the selection of the different cases analysed is provided. On this ground, the analysis proceeds with a synthetic overview of the context of reference. In the last part of the analysis, the index of localness is defined and applied to the dataset. The main conclusion is that, although there is a strong diffusion of local candidates, there are significant differences among parties, with a higher localness level of the League and the Democratic Party than Forza Italia and the Five Star Movement, especially in the Northern and Southern’s regions.

Policy Polarisation in Italy: The Short and Conflictual Life of the ‘Government of Change’ (2018–2019)

ABSTRACT This article uses the concept of policy polarisation to understand the short and conflictual life of the Conte I cabinet which remained in office in Italy from June 2018 to September 2019. We show how policy polarisation in parliament and between coalition parties shaped the formation and termination of the so-called ‘government of change’. When investigating the implementation of the government agenda, we also assess the role of the coalition contract as an (ineffective) institutional solution to problems stemming from policy divisions between the Five Star Movement and the Lega. We argue that, despite some policy accomplishments of the government, the Five Star Movement-Lega coalition appears more as a temporary experiment, whose legacy may not represent a new course of action.

Opposition Parties in the European Parliament: The Cases of Syriza, Podemos and the Five Star Movement

ABSTRACT The different crises which have affected the European Union (EU) since 2008, have triggered a major politicisation of European integration. This dynamic makes it of utmost importance to understand how parties act within the European Parliament (EP), in order to gauge whether it is possible to identify a parliamentary opposition which is Eurocritical but not Eurosceptic. For this purpose, three parties are considered: Syriza (Synaspismos Rizospastikis Aristeras, Coalition of the Radical Left), Podemos (We Can) and the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement). These parties’ positions on the EU are either unclear and/or critical, but also hard to classify as hostile to European integration. The empirical analysis highlights a significant degree of commonality in the voting behaviour of these parties and a high level of disagreement with the Eurosceptic bloc, thus pointing to a more complex political confrontation in the EP structured around: pro-EU/majority parties, Eurocritical/‘loyal’ opposition parties and Eurosceptic/anti-system parties.

The (d)evolution of political communication in Italy: Beppe Grillo’s case

The article aims at analyzing the case of Beppe Grillo and his Five Stars Movement in terms of social, cultural and linguistic phenomenon that – initially as a virtual party without a structured organization – seems to conquer both right-wing and left-wing Italian citizens notwithstanding generational and ideological differences. The success of grillini (Grillo’s supporters) in the parliamentary election of 2018 as a consequence of Matteo Renzi’s constitutional referendum failure, represents a clear sign of the leadership crisis as well as the drifting apart of the ruling class that ignored the problems of ordinary people for several years. The analysis is focused on both form and content: on the one hand, the artistic expression characteristic of Grillo, his gestures, mimicry and direct language plenty of verbal hyperboles, rhetorical figures, swearwords and blasphemous obscenities that build his uncompromising charisma, on the other modern technologies and social media (including blogs, forums, profiles) that are used to communicate efficiently with the electorate, create an image of an open-minded politician keeping up with the outer world. All the aforementioned circumstances demonstrate an innovative approach based on political communication that devolves some level of decision-making power to the party supporters being active web users: bloggers and influencers at the same time. Such paradigm is followed by other representatives of the Italian political scene nowadays.

El Movimiento 5 Estrellas: utopía digital y populismo sin adjetivos

The irruption of the Five Star Movement (M5S) has deeply transformed the Italian party system. In an unprecedented phenomenon, a protest movement constituted around an internet blog has managed to move, in only eight years, from the virtual space of the Internet to the Italian government, alternately reaching agreements with formations located on the right and the left of the ideological spectrum. In order to clarify the political nature of this sui generis phenomenon, this case study relies on primary and secondary sources to analyze the ideology, organizational structure, programmatic measures and the profile of the M5S’s voters. The analysis concludes that the M5S constitutes a rare case of «pure populism», able to discursively integrate elements of conflicting ideologies and to connect with a widespread anti-political sentiment among Italian voters, thus maximizing its electoral performance.

Populism and the (Italian) crisis: The voters and the context

This article, focusing on Italy, aims to broaden our understanding of the recent striking electoral fortunes of (differing types of) populism in the country, by locating them within multiple crises (political, economic, migration) that have shocked Europe in the last two decades. By combining individual-level survey data on voters with organizational-level interviews conducted with national and local representatives and activists of the Five Star Movement and the League, the role played by these crises in the two different Italian populisms will be disentangled from ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ perspectives – which are usually treated in isolation. The findings indicate a coherence between the political parties’ message and their respective potential voters’ orientations and attitudes (with regard to the three crises), underlining the ability of different varieties of populism to intercept (and mobilize) different grievances: whereas the economic crisis of representation is a key ingredient of both the populists’ success, the cultural crisis is more salient for the exclusionary populist League, while the political crisis is more salient for the inclusionary 5SM. For both the mobilization and representation of those citizens unsatisfied with traditional politics seems crucial. These different causes of success appear to be a useful lens through which to examine the failure of an attempt to govern by combining two differing types of populism.

Populism Against Europe in Social Media: The Eurosceptic Discourse on Twitter in Spain, Italy, France, and United Kingdom During the Campaign of the 2019 European Parliament Election

Since its inception, the European Union has been facing several challenges. The economic and refugee crises, along with the results of the British referendum, have shaped the future of Europe in the past decade. These challenges among others have encouraged the emergence of populist parties, which aim at disrupting the current status quo posing threats to democracy. In this context, the consolidation of digital media has played a key role in the circulation of populist messages to a large number of people. Such messages have questioned the political and legitimacy terms of the European Union, leading to the ideal scenario of Euroscepticism. This article examines the framing and communication strategies used by the European populist actors regarding the European Union and Euroscepticism. The aim is to identify if there are any significant ideological differences. The sample consists of the shared messages (n = 3,667) by the main European populist political parties of Spain, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom during the European Parliament election campaign in 2019. The messages published on the Twitter accounts of Podemos, Vox, the 5 Star Movement, Lega, Rassemblement National, France Insoumise, The Brexit Party, and the UKIP have been analyzed. Results show that two types of Eurosceptic discourse were detected depending on the ideology. The right-wing populists pose a Euroscepticism exclusionary discourse, based on the loss of sovereignty and the distinction of “they” - “us”, excluding the out-groups whereas the left-wing populists present a Euroscepticism inclusive discourse, to maintain the foundational values of Europe, such as equality or solidarity between different people and countries. This research found that Eurosceptic discourse is used in the communicative strategy of populist political parties on Twitter and highlights the importance of the message frame which makes the difference about it.

Technocratic Populism and Subnational Governance

AbstractAlthough scholarly interest in populism has increased as populist parties have risen across Europe, the subnational level has been largely overlooked. This article adopts an original subnational focus and explores an unlikely but increasingly prevalent political agenda: the combination of technocracy and populism. We focus on technocratic populism as a political and governance strategy at the municipal level and assess how the interaction of populism and technocracy plays out empirically in relation to administration and public policies and how the tensions and synergies between technocracy and populism are solved at the local level. The article argues that the local level is especially prone to this kind of intersection between technocratic and populist ideology. While the article is mainly an exercise in concept development, two illustrative cases at the city level, namely the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) in Rome and the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) in Prague are used to support the argument.

A spatial mixed-effects regression model for electoral data

On 4th March 2018, elections took place in Italy for the two Chambers of the Parliament. Many newspapers emphasized the victory of the 5 Star Movement (5SM) and its unprecedented dominance in most of the southern regions of Italy. Aim of this contribution is to analyze the electoral results through an ad hoc statistical model to evaluate the presence and possible impact of spatial structures. The response variable is the percentage of votes got by the 5SM in each electoral district. To handle a bounded continuous outcome with values in the open interval (0, 1), a mixture regression model is used. This model is based on a special mixture of two betas (referred to as flexible beta) sharing the same precision parameter, but displaying two distinct component means subject to an inequality constraint. Advantages of this model are its many theoretical properties which are reflected in its computational tractability. Furthermore, the special mixture structure is designed to represent a wide range of phenomena (bimodality, heavy tails, and outliers). The model is further extended through random effects to account for spatial correlation. Intensive simulation studies are performed to evaluate the fit of the proposed regression model. Inferential issues are dealt with by a (Bayesian) Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm.

Feature selection based on chaotic binary black hole algorithm for data classification

With the advance of generating high-dimensional data, feature selection is the most significant procedure to guarantee selecting the most discriminative subset of features and to improve the classification performance. As a result, a binary black hole optimization algorithm (CBBHA) has been developed by getting inspired from natural phenomena. In this paper, the most discriminating features are selected by a new chaotic binary black hole algorithm (CBBHA) where chaotic maps embedded with movement of stars in the BBHA. Ten chaotic maps are employed. Experiments on three chemical datasets show the proposed algorithm, CBBHA, has an advantage over the standard BBHA in terms of selecting relevant features with a high classification performance. Additionally the performance of CBBHA is compared with BBHA in term of the computational time efficiency which is revealing that CBBHA outperforms the BBHA.

CIitizen’s Basic Income - The new promise of Populism in the edge of Technological unemployment

The years in which we live have been characterized by a strong dynamism in the development of the political spectrum in Europe, but also in the world. traditional spectrum, as populist. The main cases of populism in the period we live in range from traditional groupings, which were revived after the global economic crisis to electoral victories, such as the 5 Star Movement in Italy, UKIP in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US. What we want to address in this article is the return of a utopian idea that has not appeared since the period of the French Revolution.

Three Roads to Populism? An Italian Field Study on the 2019 European Election

ObjectivesWe predicted populist orientation and vote for two populist parties, the Five Star Movement (FSM) and the League, in the 2019 European election by focusing on perceived economic threat, perceived cultural threat, dissatisfaction with representative democracy, and on first‐order interactions.MethodWe surveyed a quota sample of the Italian adult general population (N = 1,504) and tested a latent moderated structural equations model aimed at predicting participants’ populist vote and populist orientation.ResultsPerceived cultural threat and dissatisfaction with democracy were positively associated with populist orientation. Dissatisfaction with democracy was positively associated with votes for the FSM, while perceived cultural threat was positively associated with votes for the League. Perceived economic threat was negatively associated with votes for the League.ConclusionPopulist orientation and populist vote share just some predictors, and are associated with main effects only, but not with interactions between perceived cultural, economic, and political variables.

سیمیائیة التواصل فی (کتاب الأنواء) لابن قتیبة

حاول البحث قراءة (کتاب الأنواء لابن قتیبة)، بالمنهج السیمیائی، وبیان قیمته فی رصده لوسائل التواصل عند العرب، ,التی تندرج تحت ما یسمى بسیمیاء التواصل؛ وجاءت دراستها من خلال محورین الأول: السیمیائیة اللغویة، التی تمثلت فی دراسة عنوان الکتاب، والشواهد الشعریة، ومدونة السجع. والمحور الثانی: دراسة سیمائیة العلامات غیر لغویة؛ مثل العلامات البصریة: وتتمثل فی رصد ظهور النجوم واختفائها، والسمعیة: مثل صوت الرعد. واللونیة: مثل دلالات لون السحاب. والعلامات الحرکیة: مثل حرکة السحاب وحرکة النجوم. وسیمیاء الأوقات: مثل معرفة الأوقات التی یتنقل فیها العرب من مکان لآخر. وأوقات النتاج البشری والحیوانی والنباتی, وتقسیم أوقات فصول السنة فی البیئة العربیة. The research attempts to read Kitab al-Anwa by Ibn Qutaiba, with the semiotic approach, and to explain its value in monitoring of the means of communication between the Arabs, which called semiotics of communication. The study divides into two axes. The first axis is linguistic semiotics which consisted in studying the title of the book, poetic evidence, and the assonance. The second axis is a semantic study of non-linguistic marks; Such as visual signs which monitor the appearance and disappearance of stars, auditory which includes the sound of thunder, chromaticity which contains the connotations of cloud color, kinematic signs such as cloud movement and star movement, and the semantic time like times when Arabs move from one place to another, times of human, animal and plant production, and the division of the seasons of the year in the Arab environment.

오성운동(M5S)의 직접 의회주의와 사이버크래틱 집중주의: 포스트포퓰리스트 정치 운동의 성공과 한계

이 글은 이탈리아 오성운동의 특징을 최소 정의에 따른 포퓰리즘의 속성과 포스트포퓰리즘의 성격을 통해 밝혔다. 이 글에서 포퓰리즘은 인민과 엘리트의 적대 구도라는 사회관과 인민 의사의 최대한 직접 반영이라는 정치관을 핵심 속성으로 하는 이념이며, 포스트포퓰리즘은 구포퓰리즘과 달리 대의 정치를 수용할 뿐 아니라 신포퓰리즘과도 달리 개인주의를 수용하는 새로운 포퓰리즘이다. 오성운동은 이탈리아 사회를 엘리트(카스트)와 인민(보통 사람들)의 적대 구도로 보고 인터넷 민주주의를 통해 인민을 직접 대변하려 한다는 점에서 포퓰리즘의 최소 정의에 충실하다. 또한 당원과 인민들의 다원성과 개별성을 인정하며 인민의 의사를 웹 기반 직접 의회주의를 통해 실현하려 한다는 점에서 포스트포퓰리즘에 근접했다. 그러나 카리스마적 지도자와 그에 기반한 사이버크래틱 집중주의에 의존한다는 한계를 가졌다.

Defining problems and struggling to find solutions: Framing Roma people in Italian news websites

This article employs a quantitative content analysis of news stories (N=600) to compare how six websites of Italian national newspapers of different political orientations framed Roma people during the campaign for the 2018 Italian general election and in the six months following the formation of the government coalition between the far-right Northern League party and the Five Star Movement. Drawing from framing theory and, in particular, looking at diagnostic and prognostic frames and sources interviewed and quoted, the article shows that when talking about the Roma community, a clear ideological divide between right-wing and progressive newspapers emerged. In a trend that follows the shifting Italian political landscape, news outlets that are historically considered as centrist gave prominence almost exclusively to stories about the removal of Roma camps, evictions and arrests while neglecting the coverage of programmes that would support and help the Roma community.

Grillo and the Vacuum: Understanding the Project of the Five Stars Movement

The article investigates the persistence on the political sphere of the peculiar Five Star Movement in Italy. It does so by analyzing how the support base was mobilized on the ground in order to provide important insights on the contemporary Italian (and European) crisis of representation. The 5SM responded to the political vacuum caused by the decline of the traditional mediating role of the Italian party system with another vacuum. The absence of a traditional political plan in favour of a platform whose issues are supposedly decided by the 5SM activists, supported by a complex structure comprehensive of both vertical and horizontal features as well as an original style of communication and an ideology that officially try to capitalize on the participative side of web 2.0, offered the 5SM’s activists the hope of being in control of their future. Such perception made fortunes of the 5SM.

Populist parties and foreign policy: The case of Italy’s Five Star Movement

The role of political parties in foreign policy is gaining increasing attention. Nonetheless, despite an extraordinary interest in ‘populism’, the foreign policy of populist parties has rarely been investigated. This article provides an innovative theoretical framework, applying it on a rare example of a ‘pure’ populist party: Italy’s Five Star Movement. How has Five Star Movement positioned on Italian contribution to military operations abroad? What does such positioning say about its ideological leaning? In order to address such questions, the article analyses Five Star Movement’s MPs’ votes and speeches on foreign policy during its first term in Parliament (2013–2018). We find that, notwithstanding some ambiguities, the Movement’s stance has been mostly pacifist and humanitarian, resembling more a ‘left-libertarian populist party’ than a ‘sovereigntist far-right one’. Through these findings, the article contributes to the debate on populist parties and foreign policy in Europe, clarifying also the elusive ideological leaning of the Five Star Movement.

İhvân-ı Safâ düşüncesinde müzik ve kosmos ilişkisi

İhvân-ı Safâ düşüncesinde müzik ve kosmos ilişkisi