Ricerc@Sapienza

The advent of the Network Society has brought substantial transformations
also in the politics, which, like other areas of society, is affected by important
changes. The network, which regulates social relations, has become the place
of political discussion and that is where the most substantial part of the
electoral campaign for the 2018 general election took place. The object of
our research is the observation of the political propaganda of the Movimento
5 Stelle, the Partito Democratico and the Lega (the three most voted parties
in the Italian elections) through the institutional accounts of the political
parties on Facebook. Once collected a research sample of 1,397 posts
officially published online on the three monitored accounts, the aim of our
analysis is to investigate the communication strategies of the parties in a
phase of hybrid democracy crossed by a deep crisis of political
representation. From our analysis it emerges how the three political forces,
that refer to different electorates, organize their electoral propaganda, each
according to their own strategy.