Italian leaders’ populist communication style in 2018 election campaign

The endemic spread of populism has led researchers and scholars to investigate the phenomenon and its causes, with very different approaches that sometimes have led to conflicting results. Starting from the first studies, in fact, it emerged that the concept of populism is "vague" (Canovan 1999) "chameleonic" (Taggart 12000), and that its very constitutive aspects are difficult to identify (Tarchi 2015). Despite this intrinsic difficulty in the theoretical and empirical description of the phenomenon, there have been many attempts to define it by scholars who have focused on the multiple aspects of the concept from time to time. This work represents an attempt to identify populism as a communication style in the main Italian political leaders’ online communication starting from the operationalisation proposed by Bracciale, Andretta and Martella (2021), by both reorganising some communicative strategies and adding some communicative elements related to form and content, such as issues, function of the messages, and registers/tone of the message.