CERGU’S WORKING PAPER SERIES 2016:3 Understanding Intra-Party Politics through Text Analysis of Social Media: Three applications to the Italian case Andrea Ceron ___________________________________ Centre for European Research (CERGU) University of Gothenburg Box 711, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG January 2016 © 2016 by Ceron. All rights reserved. This paper was presented at The Workshop on Intra-Party Politics in Gothen- burg 17-18 September 2015. The workshop was co-organized by CERGU and the Party Research Network, with the support of the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Network for European Studies in Political Science. Papers in the workshop focused on three aspects of the internal dynamics of political parties; sources of information on internal party politics, addressing and recon- ciling disagreements within political parties, and the electoral or other ramifica- tions of internal tensions or divisions within parties. Understanding intra-party politics through text analysis of social media: Three applications to the Italian case. Andrea Ceron (University of Milan) [email protected] Introduction Although some scholars claim that unity is a source of party’s strength, we hardly ever observe perfect cohesion within political parties. The party is by no means a monolithic structure as it is composed by politicians retaining similar but non-identical preferences. Those sharing the most similar views often cluster together and form party factions, in order to shape the party strategy and maximize their own share of benefits. Given this premise, the fact that many parties all over the world are factionalized comes as no surprise, particularly because factionalism is not necessarily damaging to the party’s fortune (Boucek, 2012). Scholars started to investigate the impact of intra-party politics showing that factional preferences and the different policy views of individual politicians affect party platform, policy agenda and parliamentary policy- making, coalition formation, and portfolio allocation (e.g. Ceron 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Giannetti and Benoit, 2009; Greene and Haber 2014; Haber 2015). Furthermore, intra-party differences also explain the voting behavior of MPs, intra-party competition during primary elections or phenomena like party switch and party fission (Bernauer and Braüninger, 2009; Ceron, 2014a, 2015; Giannetti and Laver, 2009; Heller and Mershon 2008; McElroy, 2009; Medzihorsky et al., 2014). Factional affiliation and individual preferences are also crucial to enhance a politician’s career (Cox et al., 2000). Despite the relevance of this topic, the research on intra-party politics has remained underdeveloped for many years, mainly because assessing the preferences of politicians and party factions is a difficult task. Nowadays, some important advances in the field of quantitative text analysis allow to fill this gap. Scholars applied such techniques on several sources of textual data in order to evaluate the degree of ideological 1 heterogeneity by focusing on parliamentary speeches (Bäck et al., 2011; Benoit and Herzog 2015; Bernauer and Braüninger 2009; Proksch and Slapin, 2010), debates held at party conferences or party rallies (Greene and Haber 2014; Medzihorsky et al., 2014) or documents drafted by intra-party subgroups (Ceron 2012b; Debus and Braüninger, 2009; Giannetti and Laver, 2009). The striking rise of social media and social network sites (SNS), like Facebook and Twitter, paves the way to a new potential revolution (King 2014) and provides scholars with a new and intriguing source of data – particularly textual data – on the tastes and the opinions of citizens and politicians. Indeed, a new stream of research has started to analyze social media in order to estimate the ideological placement of politicians or citizens (Barberá 2015; Barberá et al. 2015; Boireau 2014; Bond and Messing 2015; Boutet et al., 2012; Conover et al., 2010; Hanretty 2011; King et al., 2011; Livne et al. 2011). These types of data represent an opportunity to extract information on the degree of heterogeneity related to the policy views of party factions or individual politicians and can be of use to answer a variety of questions involving intra-party dynamics. In this regard, the present paper presents three different applications that show how quantitative text analysis of public statements released, by Italian politicians, on social media and SNS can be informative of intra-party politics. In particular, we will illustrate that intra-party differences can explain: (a) a politician’s choice to endorse one or another candidate who ran for the nomination in the 2012 primary election of the centre-left; (b) a politician’s likelihood to switch off from his/her party in the aftermath of 2013 Italian election; (c) a politician’s probability to be deemed as a credible candidate for a ministerial position, by the media, or to be actually appointed as a minister of the Renzi cabinet in 2014. 1. Estimating policy positions from social media The usage of internet and social media is growing at very fast rates. In 2014 around 40% of the world population got access to the web and most of them are also active on SNS. In 2015 more than 1.5 billion users are active on Facebook and Twitter reached the number of 300 million active users. The growth of the internet audience made the web attractive to parties and candidates, mainly as a device to mobilize support (e.g., Cardenal, 2011). Indeed, politicians have incentives to open a website or a social networking profile 2 and make use of social media to inform, mobilize, and cultivate personal votes (Vergeer et al., 2012). To do that they express their opinions and release public comments trying to influence the agenda or to comment on the policy issues at stake. Politicians, however, tend to follow a top-down approach (Formenti, 2012; Vaccari, 2008) and, despite the interactive nature of Web 2.0, their behavior seems not strategically affected by the interaction with other users (Ceron 2014b).1 The usage of SNS by politicians is particularly relevant during electoral campaigns (e.g. Vergeer et al., 2013) and several studies analyzed the content broadcast on the official SNS accounts of politicians and parties in order to shed light on the dynamics of campaigns (e.g., Ceron and d’Adda 2015; Conway et al. 2013; Evans et al. 2014). However, SNS data can be interesting even when general elections are faraway. As long as users publish online information on their tastes and opinions, several scholars suggest that the analysis of social media allows to scale – on an ideological axis – the position of citizens (Barberá 2015; Barberá et al. 2015; Boireau 2014; Bond and Messing 2015; Boutet et al., 2012; Conover et al., 2010; Hanretty 2011; King et al., 2011) and politicians (Barberá et al. 2015; Boireau 2014; Bond and Messing 2015; Hanretty 2011; King et al., 2011; Livne et al. 2011). These studies adopted two different methodologies: some of them follow a network approach (Barberá 2015; Barberá et al. 2015; Bond and Messing 2015; Hanretty 2011; King et al., 2011; Livne et al. 2011), while others focus on the content of social media posts (Barberá et al. 2015; Boireau 2014; Boutet et al., 2012; Conover et al., 2010; Livne et al. 2011). Taking the cue from these works, I contend that the information available on the web is particularly suitable to estimate the preferences of ‘hidden actors’, like formal and informal intra-party subgroups or individual politicians belonging to rival party factions, whose ideological viewpoints may be not formally recorded in official documents or publicly displayed through observable behavior. In fact, estimating the policy positions of party factions is a challenging task. Several case studies indicate that parties are internally divided. However, party competition creates pressure to display cohesion in the eyes of the voters as unity may enhance a party’s electoral fortune (Alesina and Cukierman, 1990: 847; McGann, 2002; Snyder and Ting, 2002). 3 As a consequence, members supporting contrasting views about the party line and strategy should try to work out their differences on their own (Evans, 2001; Messmer, 2003) so that ‘internal disagreements are usually resolved before party positions are defined formally, as in party manifestos, or behaviorally, as in legislative votes and speeches’ (Heller, 2008: 2, italic added). Whether the solution stems from consensual bargaining and compromise or from loyalty and enforced discipline does not really matter for our purpose, as in both cases we would fail to observe disunity and we lack the information necessary to estimate the internal heterogeneity of policy views. The display of party unity may hide internal division and it does not imply perfect cohesion. But even when we observe conflict and splits, for instance in roll call votes, the extent of disagreement inside the party could be misestimated. While some scholars have been estimating factional preferences by scaling roll call votes (e.g. Spirling and Quinn, 2010), others argued that this technique only provides a description of the ‘revealed behavioural space’ (Hix and Jun, 2009) and a measure of ex-post behaviour instead of ex-ante preferences. Furthermore the actual level of division can be underestimated due to potential selection bias in the use of roll call (Carrubba et al. 2006, 2008). For these reasons Giannetti and Benoit (2009) suggest measuring factions’ positions relying on what intra-party actors say (the declared preferences) instead of on what they do (the actual behavior). Since talk is cheap heterogeneous declarations are less damaging to the party compared to the cost of non-cohesive behavior. This is even more true in the internet age when politicians can take advantage of the new media to spread their ideas and to comment over any political event, virtually in real time. Then, ‘politicians may often toe the party line while at the same time generating texts that show far less subservience to the mechanisms of party discipline’ (Giannetti and Benoit, 2009: 233).