Moreno Mancosu
Biographic Data
| ID | 292191 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Moreno Mancosu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Moreno |
| FAMILY NAME | Mancosu |
| SIGNATURE | MANCOSU M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Turin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3017-4066 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 195 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Aligning Emotions: A Comparative Analysis of Text and Imagery by European Party Leaders on Instagram
This study explores the interplay of imagery and text in online political communication by European party leaders. We examine how visual and textual components combine to convey emotions in Instagram posts published by one hundred twenty-four mainstream and populist leaders of one hundred fourteen parties in twenty-four EU countries, covering 3 months before and after the 2019 European elections. Images are analyzed through automated face and emo…
Perceived Exposure and Concern for Misinformation in Different Political Contexts: Evidence From 27 European Countries
Political misinformation is becoming an increasingly central topic in both public and academic debate. The main normative concern is that the diffusion of false political news might lead to distorted perceptions of the social and political reality. Indeed, existing research largely focuses on the determinants of public misinformation and the spread of false news. However, the mere awareness of the diffusion of fake news might have important impli…
Investigating Media Populism Worldwide
Growing evidence suggests that news media significantly contribute to disseminating, endorsing, or merely increasing the visibility of populist rhetoric. While a large amount of literature has focused on the type and volume of news coverage provided to populist actors and parties (populism through the media), there is more scarcity of knowledge regarding the media's orientation towards populism (populism by the media), partly due to a lack of sys…
Is the public legitimacy of protests rooted in the political context? An experimental study comparing protests by environmentalists and farmers
What are the characteristics of a political protest that enable it to win public support, and what is the role of the political environment? The literature has argued about the characteristics that induce the public to sympathize with protesters (such as the identity of the protesters, their demands, and their methods), but little research has focused on the role of the political context, which includes the presence of other protests making diffe…
Crowds and Smiles: Visual Opportunity Structures and the Communication of European Political Leaders During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The growing interest in political leaders’ visual communication often emphasizes specific visual features without focusing on the driving factors behind these strategies. Our study introduces the Visual Opportunity Structure (VOS) theory, aiming to explain the use of specific visual elements based on their suitability within the socio-political context. We examined the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing a large dataset (N = 73,379) of Instagram posts b…
Perceived victimhood in Italian politics: Political Ideology, Populism, and Economic Grievance
Negativity in the news and electoral behavior between first- and second-order elections
The effects of news coverage on political attitudes in election campaigns have been widely studied in academic research. In particular, a fertile branch of the literature investigated the impact of news media negativity on turnout. To date, however, findings are mixed, precluding to state a clear relationship. This paper aims to shed a light on this topic by testing whether negative coverage may affect voters' turnout and to what extent. It appro…
The life cycle of conspiracy theories: Evidence from a long-term panel survey on conspiracy beliefs in Italy
Conspiracy theories are gaining increasing interest in academic and public debate. A broad research agenda focused on the socio-political and psychological determinants of conspiracy theory beliefs, on the effect of social media as a new channel of dissemination, on the role played by populist leaders in explaining those theories, and on the impact on social and political outputs. This introduction to the special issue proposes a summary of this …
Terrorist Attacks, Stereotyping, and Attitudes Toward Immigrants: The Case of the Manchester Bombing
Objective Growing research focusing on citizens' psychological reactions to terrorism finds that attacks perpetrated by individuals belonging to Muslim minorities increase negative attitudes toward immigrants as a whole. We argue that this empirical regularity might be explained by stereotyping, which produces immediate emotional reactions among people holding exogenously positive/neutral attitudes toward immigrants. Methods We employ a quasi‐exp…
Political consequences of conspiratorial thinking: Evidence from 2016 Italian constitutional referendum
Losers get sick? The effects of electoral defeat on perceptions of pandemic risk
Research in political behavior shows that citizens update their past perceptions and future expectations over several phenomena depending on whether their favorite party wins or loses the elections. This bias is explained by different psychological mechanisms triggered by individuals' attachment and trust in political parties. In this paper we investigate whether such a winner-loser effect conditions people's concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic.…
The red and the black: Neo-fascist inheritance in the electoral success of the Lega in Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche
In 2018 Italian general elections, the Lega has dramatically increased its consensus in the ‘red belt’, the central area of the country traditionally ruled by centre-left parties. Pundits have argued that this performance can be attributed to the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, who changed the ideological location of the Lega by transforming it in a national right-wing party. This article hypothesizes that geographical trajectories of diffusion…
Is It the Message or the Messenger?”: Conspiracy Endorsement and Media Sources
Public opinion literature on conspiracy theories mainly focuses on individual and contextual factors predicting people’s beliefs in conspiratorial news. However, little research to date has considered the role of the source of the news, and its interaction with the news content, in explaining people’s receptivity to those narratives. By employing a survey experiment on a sample of U.S. citizens, we test whether the conspiratorial/debunking conten…
Terrorist attacks and Europeans’ attitudes towards immigrants: An experimental approach
Over the past several years an increasing number of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam and targeting civilians have taken place in many Western democracies, calling for more research on the impact of these exogenous events on citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. Using a quasi‐experimental design, this study examines the short‐term effect of the Paris attacks of the night of 13 November 2015 on the attitudes towards European Union…
The Impact of Political Sophistication and Motivated Reasoning on Misinformation
The debate around political misinformation is gaining increasing relevance among the general and academic audience. If a large body of work is devoted to understanding the mechanisms of diffusion of inaccurate/false news contents (especially on social media), few studies have focused on the individual mechanisms by which people believe in those news. We look at the interplay between two mechanisms: partisan motivated reasoning and political sophi…
What You Can Scrape and What Is Right to Scrape: A Proposal for a Tool to Collect Public Facebook Data
In reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has restricted the access to its Application Programming Interface (API). This new policy has damaged the possibility for independent researchers to study relevant topics in political and social behavior. Yet, much of the public information that the researchers may be interested in is still available on Facebook, and can be still systematically collected through web scraping techniques. The…
The European Union in the media coverage of the 2019 European election campaign in Italy: Towards the Europeanization of the Italian public sphere
This article investigates the patterns of Europeanization of the Italian public sphere during the 2019 European Elections campaign. Europeanization is meant as a multifaceted process. The visibility and salience of the European Union (E.U.) within the public debate is realized by dynamics involving different actors, in terms of interactions, connections and contaminations between different public spheres. The aim of the article is to clarify whet…
A Tale of Bias: Longitudinal Evidence of the Effect of Electoral Defeat on Citizens’ Evaluations of the Economy
The winner–loser electoral status may affect citizens’ perceptions of the national economy. In the context of Europe, this issue has aroused little interest as multi-party competition makes it difficult to study. We look at the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, a top-down national referendum, which approximates second-order elections and divides voters in two groups, allowing the study of the effects of elections on opinions. Using a pre-po…
Short is Better’. Evaluating the Attentiveness of Online Respondents Through Screener Questions in a Real Survey Environment
In online surveys, the control of respondents is almost absent: for this reason, the use of screener questions or “screeners” has been suggested to evaluate respondent attention. Screeners ask respondents to follow a certain number of instructions described in a text that contains a varying amount of misleading information. Previous work focused on ad-hoc experimental designs composed of a few questions, generally administered to small samples. U…
Political disagreement and vote volatility: The role of familism across different European countries
Interpersonal influence shapes political behavior and attitudes. So far, however, little efforts have been devoted to testing this mechanism comparatively in Europe. This paper aims at explaining differences in influence patterns in three European countries (Italy, Germany, and the UK). Based on works in demography, we argue that in Mediterranean cultures (characterized by high degrees of familism), people are more prone to be affected by attitud…
Contextual effects, awareness, and voting behaviour: Does knowing about local politics increase contextual influence
Context is usually employed to explain voting behaviour, but the way in which it affects people remains obscure. Previous studies have stressed that awareness of the context might indirectly account for political environments’ influence. People aware of their context are expected to be more affected by the relative prevalence of party supporters in their place of residence compared with unaware citizens. By employing stacked logistic regression m…
Populism and the Gender Gap: Comparing Digital Engagement with Populist and Non-populist Facebook Pages in France, Italy, and Spain
This paper clarifies whether and to what extent populist communication could drive different gender-oriented reactions. We adopted an original research design intending Facebook as a natural environment where investigating the interaction between social media users and populist and non-populist parties. Our case selection considers three countries falling into the pluralist polarized media system: France, Italy, and Spain. A human content analysi…
Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (Apim) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications
Recently, the social sciences have witnessed a rising interest in dyadic design, as an efficient way to disentangle mechanisms of interpersonal influence. Despite the relevance of this design to political research, few efforts have been made to collect and efficiently analyze dyadic data. In this article, we suggest the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model as a useful tool to test bidirectional effects in dyadic data on political attitudes and beh…
Believing in Conspiracy Theories: Evidence from an Exploratory Analysis of Italian Survey Data
Beliefs in conspiracy theories have attracted significant international media attention in recent years. This phenomenon has been studied in the US but while anecdotal evidence suggests it is also widespread among the Italian public, little evidence has been collected to assess it empirically. Using data from a 2016 survey, this pioneering study of the Italian case investigates the extent of diffusion of conspiracy theories among Italians and tes…
Local and national effects in the electoral cycle: The case of Italy (2001–2009)
Local and national effects in the electoral cycle: the case of Italy, 2001–2009. Territory, Politics, Governance. According to electoral cycle theory, in second-order elections small parties are expected to improve their performance, while big parties are expected to be punished. This paper formally tests whether these electoral cycle effects can be considered as solely national in nature or whether they vary at the local level. It tests the expe…
Believing in Conspiracy Theories: Evidence from an Exploratory Analysis of Italian Survey Data
Beliefs in conspiracy theories have attracted significant international media attention in recent years. This phenomenon has been studied in the US but while anecdotal evidence suggests it is also widespread among the Italian public, little evidence has been collected to assess it empirically. Using data from a 2016 survey, this pioneering study of the Italian case investigates the extent of diffusion of conspiracy theories among Italians and tes…
Terrorist attacks and Europeans’ attitudes towards immigrants: An experimental approach
Over the past several years an increasing number of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam and targeting civilians have taken place in many Western democracies, calling for more research on the impact of these exogenous events on citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. Using a quasi‐experimental design, this study examines the short‐term effect of the Paris attacks of the night of 13 November 2015 on the attitudes towards European Union…
The Impact of Political Sophistication and Motivated Reasoning on Misinformation
The debate around political misinformation is gaining increasing relevance among the general and academic audience. If a large body of work is devoted to understanding the mechanisms of diffusion of inaccurate/false news contents (especially on social media), few studies have focused on the individual mechanisms by which people believe in those news. We look at the interplay between two mechanisms: partisan motivated reasoning and political sophi…
Is It the Message or the Messenger?”: Conspiracy Endorsement and Media Sources
Public opinion literature on conspiracy theories mainly focuses on individual and contextual factors predicting people’s beliefs in conspiratorial news. However, little research to date has considered the role of the source of the news, and its interaction with the news content, in explaining people’s receptivity to those narratives. By employing a survey experiment on a sample of U.S. citizens, we test whether the conspiratorial/debunking conten…
The Spreading of Cohabitation as a Diffusion Process: Evidence from Italy
What You Can Scrape and What Is Right to Scrape: A Proposal for a Tool to Collect Public Facebook Data
In reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has restricted the access to its Application Programming Interface (API). This new policy has damaged the possibility for independent researchers to study relevant topics in political and social behavior. Yet, much of the public information that the researchers may be interested in is still available on Facebook, and can be still systematically collected through web scraping techniques. The…
Political consequences of conspiratorial thinking: Evidence from 2016 Italian constitutional referendum
The life cycle of conspiracy theories: Evidence from a long-term panel survey on conspiracy beliefs in Italy
Conspiracy theories are gaining increasing interest in academic and public debate. A broad research agenda focused on the socio-political and psychological determinants of conspiracy theory beliefs, on the effect of social media as a new channel of dissemination, on the role played by populist leaders in explaining those theories, and on the impact on social and political outputs. This introduction to the special issue proposes a summary of this …
A Tale of Bias: Longitudinal Evidence of the Effect of Electoral Defeat on Citizens’ Evaluations of the Economy
The winner–loser electoral status may affect citizens’ perceptions of the national economy. In the context of Europe, this issue has aroused little interest as multi-party competition makes it difficult to study. We look at the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, a top-down national referendum, which approximates second-order elections and divides voters in two groups, allowing the study of the effects of elections on opinions. Using a pre-po…
Contexts, networks, and voting behavior: The social flow of political communication in Italy
Previous research demonstrated that different contextual sources can affect voting behavior. Homogeneous familiar networks affect individual behavior of people embedded in these networks toward voting for certain parties. Moreover, being exposed to higher levels of homogeneity in the geographical place where one lives contributes to developing higher propensities to vote for a certain political object. By means of 2006 National Italian Elections …
Terrorist Attacks, Stereotyping, and Attitudes Toward Immigrants: The Case of the Manchester Bombing
Objective Growing research focusing on citizens' psychological reactions to terrorism finds that attacks perpetrated by individuals belonging to Muslim minorities increase negative attitudes toward immigrants as a whole. We argue that this empirical regularity might be explained by stereotyping, which produces immediate emotional reactions among people holding exogenously positive/neutral attitudes toward immigrants. Methods We employ a quasi‐exp…
Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (Apim) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications
Recently, the social sciences have witnessed a rising interest in dyadic design, as an efficient way to disentangle mechanisms of interpersonal influence. Despite the relevance of this design to political research, few efforts have been made to collect and efficiently analyze dyadic data. In this article, we suggest the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model as a useful tool to test bidirectional effects in dyadic data on political attitudes and beh…
Perceived victimhood in Italian politics: Political Ideology, Populism, and Economic Grievance
The red and the black: Neo-fascist inheritance in the electoral success of the Lega in Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche
In 2018 Italian general elections, the Lega has dramatically increased its consensus in the ‘red belt’, the central area of the country traditionally ruled by centre-left parties. Pundits have argued that this performance can be attributed to the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, who changed the ideological location of the Lega by transforming it in a national right-wing party. This article hypothesizes that geographical trajectories of diffusion…
The European Union in the media coverage of the 2019 European election campaign in Italy: Towards the Europeanization of the Italian public sphere
This article investigates the patterns of Europeanization of the Italian public sphere during the 2019 European Elections campaign. Europeanization is meant as a multifaceted process. The visibility and salience of the European Union (E.U.) within the public debate is realized by dynamics involving different actors, in terms of interactions, connections and contaminations between different public spheres. The aim of the article is to clarify whet…
Short is Better’. Evaluating the Attentiveness of Online Respondents Through Screener Questions in a Real Survey Environment
In online surveys, the control of respondents is almost absent: for this reason, the use of screener questions or “screeners” has been suggested to evaluate respondent attention. Screeners ask respondents to follow a certain number of instructions described in a text that contains a varying amount of misleading information. Previous work focused on ad-hoc experimental designs composed of a few questions, generally administered to small samples. U…
Contextual effects, awareness, and voting behaviour: Does knowing about local politics increase contextual influence
Context is usually employed to explain voting behaviour, but the way in which it affects people remains obscure. Previous studies have stressed that awareness of the context might indirectly account for political environments’ influence. People aware of their context are expected to be more affected by the relative prevalence of party supporters in their place of residence compared with unaware citizens. By employing stacked logistic regression m…
Aligning Emotions: A Comparative Analysis of Text and Imagery by European Party Leaders on Instagram
This study explores the interplay of imagery and text in online political communication by European party leaders. We examine how visual and textual components combine to convey emotions in Instagram posts published by one hundred twenty-four mainstream and populist leaders of one hundred fourteen parties in twenty-four EU countries, covering 3 months before and after the 2019 European elections. Images are analyzed through automated face and emo…
Perceived Exposure and Concern for Misinformation in Different Political Contexts: Evidence From 27 European Countries
Political misinformation is becoming an increasingly central topic in both public and academic debate. The main normative concern is that the diffusion of false political news might lead to distorted perceptions of the social and political reality. Indeed, existing research largely focuses on the determinants of public misinformation and the spread of false news. However, the mere awareness of the diffusion of fake news might have important impli…
Investigating Media Populism Worldwide
Growing evidence suggests that news media significantly contribute to disseminating, endorsing, or merely increasing the visibility of populist rhetoric. While a large amount of literature has focused on the type and volume of news coverage provided to populist actors and parties (populism through the media), there is more scarcity of knowledge regarding the media's orientation towards populism (populism by the media), partly due to a lack of sys…
Crowds and Smiles: Visual Opportunity Structures and the Communication of European Political Leaders During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The growing interest in political leaders’ visual communication often emphasizes specific visual features without focusing on the driving factors behind these strategies. Our study introduces the Visual Opportunity Structure (VOS) theory, aiming to explain the use of specific visual elements based on their suitability within the socio-political context. We examined the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing a large dataset (N = 73,379) of Instagram posts b…
Political disagreement and vote volatility: The role of familism across different European countries
Interpersonal influence shapes political behavior and attitudes. So far, however, little efforts have been devoted to testing this mechanism comparatively in Europe. This paper aims at explaining differences in influence patterns in three European countries (Italy, Germany, and the UK). Based on works in demography, we argue that in Mediterranean cultures (characterized by high degrees of familism), people are more prone to be affected by attitud…
Populism and the Gender Gap: Comparing Digital Engagement with Populist and Non-populist Facebook Pages in France, Italy, and Spain
This paper clarifies whether and to what extent populist communication could drive different gender-oriented reactions. We adopted an original research design intending Facebook as a natural environment where investigating the interaction between social media users and populist and non-populist parties. Our case selection considers three countries falling into the pluralist polarized media system: France, Italy, and Spain. A human content analysi…
Geographical context, interest in politics and voting behaviour: The case of the Northern League in Italy
The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between political involvement (namely, interest in political issues) and context in explaining voting behaviour with regard to the Northern League (NL), an Italian regionalist party. The basis of the paper’s theoretical argument is the differentiation between core (or more attentive) and peripheral (or less attentive) voters, conceptualised in classical works on voting behaviour. According …
Geographical context, interest in politics and voting behaviour: The case of the Northern League in Italy
The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between political involvement (namely, interest in political issues) and context in explaining voting behaviour with regard to the Northern League (NL), an Italian regionalist party. The basis of the paper’s theoretical argument is the differentiation between core (or more attentive) and peripheral (or less attentive) voters, conceptualised in classical works on voting behaviour. According …
Local and national effects in the electoral cycle: The case of Italy (2001–2009)
Local and national effects in the electoral cycle: the case of Italy, 2001–2009. Territory, Politics, Governance. According to electoral cycle theory, in second-order elections small parties are expected to improve their performance, while big parties are expected to be punished. This paper formally tests whether these electoral cycle effects can be considered as solely national in nature or whether they vary at the local level. It tests the expe…
The Spreading of Cohabitation as a Diffusion Process: Evidence from Italy
Contexts, networks, and voting behavior: The social flow of political communication in Italy
Previous research demonstrated that different contextual sources can affect voting behavior. Homogeneous familiar networks affect individual behavior of people embedded in these networks toward voting for certain parties. Moreover, being exposed to higher levels of homogeneity in the geographical place where one lives contributes to developing higher propensities to vote for a certain political object. By means of 2006 National Italian Elections …
Believing in Conspiracy Theories: Evidence from an Exploratory Analysis of Italian Survey Data
Beliefs in conspiracy theories have attracted significant international media attention in recent years. This phenomenon has been studied in the US but while anecdotal evidence suggests it is also widespread among the Italian public, little evidence has been collected to assess it empirically. Using data from a 2016 survey, this pioneering study of the Italian case investigates the extent of diffusion of conspiracy theories among Italians and tes…
Populism and the Gender Gap: Comparing Digital Engagement with Populist and Non-populist Facebook Pages in France, Italy, and Spain
This paper clarifies whether and to what extent populist communication could drive different gender-oriented reactions. We adopted an original research design intending Facebook as a natural environment where investigating the interaction between social media users and populist and non-populist parties. Our case selection considers three countries falling into the pluralist polarized media system: France, Italy, and Spain. A human content analysi…
Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (Apim) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications
Recently, the social sciences have witnessed a rising interest in dyadic design, as an efficient way to disentangle mechanisms of interpersonal influence. Despite the relevance of this design to political research, few efforts have been made to collect and efficiently analyze dyadic data. In this article, we suggest the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model as a useful tool to test bidirectional effects in dyadic data on political attitudes and beh…
The European Union in the media coverage of the 2019 European election campaign in Italy: Towards the Europeanization of the Italian public sphere
This article investigates the patterns of Europeanization of the Italian public sphere during the 2019 European Elections campaign. Europeanization is meant as a multifaceted process. The visibility and salience of the European Union (E.U.) within the public debate is realized by dynamics involving different actors, in terms of interactions, connections and contaminations between different public spheres. The aim of the article is to clarify whet…
A Tale of Bias: Longitudinal Evidence of the Effect of Electoral Defeat on Citizens’ Evaluations of the Economy
The winner–loser electoral status may affect citizens’ perceptions of the national economy. In the context of Europe, this issue has aroused little interest as multi-party competition makes it difficult to study. We look at the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, a top-down national referendum, which approximates second-order elections and divides voters in two groups, allowing the study of the effects of elections on opinions. Using a pre-po…
Short is Better’. Evaluating the Attentiveness of Online Respondents Through Screener Questions in a Real Survey Environment
In online surveys, the control of respondents is almost absent: for this reason, the use of screener questions or “screeners” has been suggested to evaluate respondent attention. Screeners ask respondents to follow a certain number of instructions described in a text that contains a varying amount of misleading information. Previous work focused on ad-hoc experimental designs composed of a few questions, generally administered to small samples. U…
Political disagreement and vote volatility: The role of familism across different European countries
Interpersonal influence shapes political behavior and attitudes. So far, however, little efforts have been devoted to testing this mechanism comparatively in Europe. This paper aims at explaining differences in influence patterns in three European countries (Italy, Germany, and the UK). Based on works in demography, we argue that in Mediterranean cultures (characterized by high degrees of familism), people are more prone to be affected by attitud…
Contextual effects, awareness, and voting behaviour: Does knowing about local politics increase contextual influence
Context is usually employed to explain voting behaviour, but the way in which it affects people remains obscure. Previous studies have stressed that awareness of the context might indirectly account for political environments’ influence. People aware of their context are expected to be more affected by the relative prevalence of party supporters in their place of residence compared with unaware citizens. By employing stacked logistic regression m…
The red and the black: Neo-fascist inheritance in the electoral success of the Lega in Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche
In 2018 Italian general elections, the Lega has dramatically increased its consensus in the ‘red belt’, the central area of the country traditionally ruled by centre-left parties. Pundits have argued that this performance can be attributed to the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, who changed the ideological location of the Lega by transforming it in a national right-wing party. This article hypothesizes that geographical trajectories of diffusion…
Is It the Message or the Messenger?”: Conspiracy Endorsement and Media Sources
Public opinion literature on conspiracy theories mainly focuses on individual and contextual factors predicting people’s beliefs in conspiratorial news. However, little research to date has considered the role of the source of the news, and its interaction with the news content, in explaining people’s receptivity to those narratives. By employing a survey experiment on a sample of U.S. citizens, we test whether the conspiratorial/debunking conten…
Terrorist attacks and Europeans’ attitudes towards immigrants: An experimental approach
Over the past several years an increasing number of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam and targeting civilians have taken place in many Western democracies, calling for more research on the impact of these exogenous events on citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. Using a quasi‐experimental design, this study examines the short‐term effect of the Paris attacks of the night of 13 November 2015 on the attitudes towards European Union…
The Impact of Political Sophistication and Motivated Reasoning on Misinformation
The debate around political misinformation is gaining increasing relevance among the general and academic audience. If a large body of work is devoted to understanding the mechanisms of diffusion of inaccurate/false news contents (especially on social media), few studies have focused on the individual mechanisms by which people believe in those news. We look at the interplay between two mechanisms: partisan motivated reasoning and political sophi…
What You Can Scrape and What Is Right to Scrape: A Proposal for a Tool to Collect Public Facebook Data
In reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has restricted the access to its Application Programming Interface (API). This new policy has damaged the possibility for independent researchers to study relevant topics in political and social behavior. Yet, much of the public information that the researchers may be interested in is still available on Facebook, and can be still systematically collected through web scraping techniques. The…
Terrorist Attacks, Stereotyping, and Attitudes Toward Immigrants: The Case of the Manchester Bombing
Objective Growing research focusing on citizens' psychological reactions to terrorism finds that attacks perpetrated by individuals belonging to Muslim minorities increase negative attitudes toward immigrants as a whole. We argue that this empirical regularity might be explained by stereotyping, which produces immediate emotional reactions among people holding exogenously positive/neutral attitudes toward immigrants. Methods We employ a quasi‐exp…
Political consequences of conspiratorial thinking: Evidence from 2016 Italian constitutional referendum
Losers get sick? The effects of electoral defeat on perceptions of pandemic risk
Research in political behavior shows that citizens update their past perceptions and future expectations over several phenomena depending on whether their favorite party wins or loses the elections. This bias is explained by different psychological mechanisms triggered by individuals' attachment and trust in political parties. In this paper we investigate whether such a winner-loser effect conditions people's concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic.…
Negativity in the news and electoral behavior between first- and second-order elections
The effects of news coverage on political attitudes in election campaigns have been widely studied in academic research. In particular, a fertile branch of the literature investigated the impact of news media negativity on turnout. To date, however, findings are mixed, precluding to state a clear relationship. This paper aims to shed a light on this topic by testing whether negative coverage may affect voters' turnout and to what extent. It appro…
The life cycle of conspiracy theories: Evidence from a long-term panel survey on conspiracy beliefs in Italy
Conspiracy theories are gaining increasing interest in academic and public debate. A broad research agenda focused on the socio-political and psychological determinants of conspiracy theory beliefs, on the effect of social media as a new channel of dissemination, on the role played by populist leaders in explaining those theories, and on the impact on social and political outputs. This introduction to the special issue proposes a summary of this …
Crowds and Smiles: Visual Opportunity Structures and the Communication of European Political Leaders During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The growing interest in political leaders’ visual communication often emphasizes specific visual features without focusing on the driving factors behind these strategies. Our study introduces the Visual Opportunity Structure (VOS) theory, aiming to explain the use of specific visual elements based on their suitability within the socio-political context. We examined the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing a large dataset (N = 73,379) of Instagram posts b…
Perceived victimhood in Italian politics: Political Ideology, Populism, and Economic Grievance
Aligning Emotions: A Comparative Analysis of Text and Imagery by European Party Leaders on Instagram
This study explores the interplay of imagery and text in online political communication by European party leaders. We examine how visual and textual components combine to convey emotions in Instagram posts published by one hundred twenty-four mainstream and populist leaders of one hundred fourteen parties in twenty-four EU countries, covering 3 months before and after the 2019 European elections. Images are analyzed through automated face and emo…
Political science (27 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (14 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Economics (12 works)