Resisting right-wing populism in power: a comparative analysis of the Facebook activities of social movements in Italy and the UK

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to present a comparative study of the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in power through social media, by looking at cases in Italy and the United Kingdom. The research question is how social movements are implementing a process of reactive political identity construction – i.e. political identification – and a political counter-strategy by opposing right-wing populism in power through their Facebook official accounts. It implements a mixed-method research design with in-depth semi-structured interviews and a two-step quantitative text analysis based on Topic Model and Dictionary Method.KEYWORDS: Social movementssocial mediaright-wing populismtext-as-datamixed methods Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsNicolò PennucciNicolò Pennucci is a PhD candidate in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence (Italy). He works on civil society reaction to right-wing populism in the UK, Italy and the United States. He employs mixed method combining qualitative interviews and computational methods.