Postmodern Mayors:The 2011 Local Elections in Milan and Turin in and beyond the Media

This article presents and discusses the results of the data monitoring carried out, with regard to the 2011 municipal election campaign in Milan and Turin (March 7 and May 29), by the Observatory on Political Communication. The research, aimed at studying the impact of the campaign in the local and national arenas, is focused mainly on two aspects: (a) the political communication strategies implemented by the leading mayoral candidates, (b) the analysis of campaign coverage by the media. From this perspective, the election campaigns in Milan and Turin offer themselves as informative cases for investigating – in relation to the strategies and communication techniques adopted and the different roles played by political journalism – how politics and the media are interrelated. On the one hand, in Turin the election was marked by the confirmation of the existing distribution of political power, low levels of media coverage and the relevance of local specificities. On the other hand, in Milan media interest and coverage of the election campaign was high, because of the symbolic meaning of the competition, which extended beyond the boundaries of the municipality, and the fact that the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was personally involved. In both cases analysed, the winning candidates conducted postmodern campaigns that sustained a significant degree of citizen involvement in the electoral competition.