(Nearly) Ten Years of Social Media and Political Elections in Italy: Questions, Platforms, and Methods

Abstract

In this article, we reconstruct the academic discourse surrounding social media and elections in an Italian context. We follow Neumayer and Rossi’s conceptualization of academic discourse concerning political protest and digital technology as constructed out of three components: (a) the social phenomena under investigation, (b) technological development, and (c) methods and techniques. In the context of social media and elections, these three components may be identified as (a) the research questions that researchers seek to answer, (b) the social media platforms and data used for the analysis, and (c) the methods adopted to analyze the data. While these three dimensions are deeply intertwined, we argue that, when analyzed independently, it is possible to better see both the longitudinal evolution of each dimension and their interdependencies.