Political Information Exposure and Populist Attitudes in the «Laboratory of Populism». An Exploratory Analysis of the 2018 Italian General Election Campaign

The 2018 general elections represented a turning point in Italian politics because of the huge success of two populist parties: Five Star Movement and Salvini's League. Italy was only the last, even if one of the most relevant, manifestation of a general trend: a number of populist formations have achieved electoral success in countries with different economic and political characteristics. According to the literature on populism, the communicative dimension of this phenomenon is one of the key factors behind its widespread success. Despite the amount of scholarships on this, so far little attention has been paid to the relationship between voters' political information exposure and their populist attitudes, and no study has addressed the topic with reference to the countries with a media system belonging to the Mediterranean Model. The aim of this article is to fill this gap in the literature by providing an exploratory study on how the exposure to political information through specific kinds of media outlets is associated with populist attitudes in Italy. In order to do so, the article employs the data collected through a Rolling Cross Section Survey conducted by ITANES on a representative sample of Italian voters (n = 5528) during the campaign for the 2018 Italian General Election.