The politics of fission: an analysis of Faction Breakaways among Italian Parties (1946–2011)

This article investigates intra-party politics and explores the determinants of factional breakaways, going beyond the unitary actor assumption. It presents a game-theoretic model that focuses on intra-party competition and bargaining dynamics to analyse the interplay between party leaders and minority factions. It tests several hypotheses based on the formal model using a new dataset that contains information about the strength and policy positions of factions inside Italian parties, from 1946 to 2011, measured through quantitative content analysis of motions presented during party congresses. The results show that office, policy and electoral motives influence factions' decisions to break away. Other elements - such as intra-party democracy, the electoral system and party system competitiveness - also affect leaders' attitudes toward compromising and alter the likelihood of a split

Intra-party politics in 140 characters

Scholars have emphasized the need to deepen investigation of intraparty politics. Recent studies look at social media as a source of information on the ideological preferences of politicians and political actors. In this regard, the present article tests whether social media messages published by politicians are a suitable source of data. It applies quantitative text analysis to the public statements released by politicians on social media in order to measure intraparty heterogeneity and assess its effects. Three different applications to the Italian case are discussed. Indeed, the content of messages posted online is informative on the ideological preferences of politicians and proved to be useful to understand intraparty dynamics. Intraparty divergences measured through social media analysis explain: (a) a politician\u2019s choice to endorse one or another party leader, (b) a politician\u2019s likelihood to switch off from his or her parliamentary party group; and (c) a politician\u2019s probability to be appointed as a minister

INTEGRATING PHYLOGENOMICS AND CHROMOSOME MAPPING TO STUDY THE EVOLUTIONARY RELATIONSHIPS AMONG EUKARYOTES AND THE EVOLUTION OF THEIR GENOMES

Our knowledge about the evolution of eukaryotes and their genomes is very limited because it has largely been based on studies of plants, animals and fungi, which are not a significant representation of the diversity across the eukaryotic tree of life. Advances in sequencing technologies are helping to expand our knowledge by including underrepresented clades and revealing that eukaryotic genomes are much more complex and dynamic than originally thought. In response to the need to explore such levels of complexity in eukaryotic genomes and the earliest events of eukaryotic evolution, this dissertation focuses on the development of bioinformatic and phylogenomic tools to study karyotype evolution and answering deep evolutionary questions. The first chapter covers the development of a phylogenomic chromosome mapper, PhyloChromoMap, and its use to study karyotype evolution in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. In addition to providing a very flexible and powerful tool to map the phylogenetic history of genes across karyotypes, this chapter reveals very distinctive patterns of evolution between subtelomeric and internal regions of the chromosomes of P. falciparum. The second chapter focuses on the development of PhyloToL, a taxon- and gene-rich phylogenomic pipeline. This chapter presents examples of how to use PhyloToL for phylogenomic studies and studies of gene family evolution, and presents a series of benchmark studies comparing PhyloToL against other popular phylogenomic pipelines. Finally, the third chapter focuses on using PhyloToL to explore one of the most critical questions in field of evolution, the root of the eukaryotic tree of life. The results in this chapter suggest that the root should be placed between Opisthokonta and all other eukaryotes. Overall this dissertation contributes insights of the earliest events of evolution in eukaryotes and provides novel approaches to study this topic. The results of this dissertation are important for comparative biology as it allows to understand the timing and mode of evolution of eukaryotic features across the eukaryotic tree of lif

Breakups hurt: Party switching and perceived proximity between politicians and their party

What are the effects of party defections on the attitudes of politicians who remain loyal to the party? We answer by combining multiple sources of data into a comprehensive novel data set on parliamentary party switching, to estimate how this affects the perceived distance between a politician and his party. Focusing on the theory of cognitive dissonance and the black sheep effect, we hypothesize that politicians perceive themselves closer to their parties when those parties recently suffered defections. The effect should be greater among incumbent politicians as they directly experience divisions, but also among officials dissatisfied with the leadership as their dissonance should be stronger. Statistical analyses of data from two elite surveys, on a sample of 13,256 politicians belonging to 92 parties that ran in 28 elections held between 2005 and 2015 in 14 countries, provide support for our hypotheses and shed light on the consequences of intra-party defections

Still ‘fire in the (full) belly’? Anti-establishment rhetoric before and after government participation

Scholars argued that anti-establishment parties use a populist rhetoric that appeals to the worst instincts of people. Indeed, populist politicians are often viewed as charismatic leaders that have fire in their belly. While in the past these parties heavily relied on anti-establishment platforms and communication rhetoric, their increasing electoral success along with the growing duties linked with government membership transform them into more established parties, rather than pure outsiders, and cast doubts on the feasibility of keeping a populist rhetoric. This paper compares right-wing and non-right-wing populism, investigating whether populist leaders change their rhetorical strategy once in office, decreasing the level of negativity and adopting a more forward-looking and inclusive style of communication, with a stronger focus on fulfilling the policy proposal made during the electoral campaign rather than blaming political rivals. For this purpose, we collected a new corpus of political speeches extracted from video messages posted on Facebook by four anti-establishment party leaders in three countries (Austria, Italy and Spain), from 2016 to 2018, i.e., immediately before and immediately after their access to power. Overall, 30 h of recorded audio from 215 videos (amounting to around 140 million visualizations) have been analyzed using topic models and well-established semantic psycholinguistic dictionaries. The results highlight slight changes in the rhetoric of populist leaders once in power, mostly for non-right-wing populists, as their language becomes less negative, less assertive and more focused on government duties

Commenting on Political Topics Through Twitter: Is European Politics European?

The aim of this study was to explore social media, and specifically Twitter's potential to generate a European demos. Our use of data derived from social media complements the traditional use of mass media and survey data within existing studies. We selected two Twitter hashtags of European relevance, #schengen and #ttip, to test several theories on a European demos (non-demos, European democracy, or pan-European demos) and to determine which of these theories was most applicable in the case of Twitter topics of European relevance. To answer the research question, we performed sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis performed on data gathered on social media platforms, such as Twitter, constitutes an alternative methodological approach to more formal surveys (e.g., Eurobarometer) and mass media content analysis. Three dimensions were coded: (1) sentiments toward the issue public, (2) sentiments toward the European Union (EU), and (3) the type of framing. Among all of the available algorithms for conducting sentiment analysis, integrated sentiment analysis (iSA), developed by the Blog of Voices at the University of Milan, was selected for the data analysis. This is a novel supervised algorithm that was specifically designed for analyses of social networks and the Web 2.0 sphere (Twitter, blogs, etc.), taking the abundance of noise within digital environments into consideration. An examination and discussion of the results shows that for these two hashtags, the results were more aligned with the demoicracy and "European lite identity" models than with the model of a pan-European demos