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The Citizen-User and the Crowd-Mediated Politics of the Five Star Movement

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Francesco Bailo The citizen-user and the crowd-mediated politics of the Five Star Movement Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 2 Francesco Bailo This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. Francesco Bailo 3 4 Francesco Bailo Abstract This thesis described the trajectory of the Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S, 2005- 2014) from the perspective of the citizens who, as Internet users, participated in in the political enterprise. Citizen-users, enabled and empowered by Internet and mobile technologies, shaped and sustained the identity and evolution of the movement that became the M5S. The case study selected for this research, the M5S, is exceptional due to the magnitude of its success; but its features (Internet-centered and fluid ideology) are becoming more common among polit- ical organisations in Western democracies. The goal of the thesis is to assess the impact of the Internet on the political process, through its connecting, mobil- ising, organising, and to characterise the shape of political talk among citizens. This is achieved by applying quantitative methods, including network analysis and natural language processing, on 10 years of user-generated data collected mainly from four sources: the blog of the Movement’s founder, the M5S official forum, Facebook and Meetup.com. The thesis finds that the online discussion fora fostered diversity without fragmentation, and contributed on at least one occasion to shape the policy agenda of the M5S. Furthermore, the meetups of the Movement maintained their capacity to attract and mobilise users, and their ter- ritorial distribution clearly correlate with local results of the M5S in two elections, suggesting a positive impact of Internet-enabled mobilisation. Finally, given the votes received in the 2013 general election, the political communication generated over the Internet offset the low attention dedicated by TV news broadcast to the Movement during the electoral campaign. As Internet and mobile technologies are routinised, it is easy to see how their importance in political organisation and deliberation will grow. By studying the application of ICTs in the case of the M5S, this thesis offers insights into their use in practice, as well as pointing to possible democratic risks if online deliberation is non controlled to guaran- tee its fairness and openness but instead steered by the leadership, turning a deliberating community of citizen-users into a noisy crowd. 5 6 Francesco Bailo Acknowledgements First and foremost I want to thank my supervisor Ariadne Vromen. I could use many words to describe how incredibly important her work has been for this thesis and for me; what I am most grateful for is that she has never stopped showing me how important it is to love your job, in order to do it best. I have also greatly benefited from discussing this thesis with friends from the University of Sydney, the University of Canberra and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. In particular, I want to acknowledge, Colombina Schaeffer, Max Grömping, Guglielmo Briscese, Francesco Possemato, Ben Goldsmith, Mike Jensen, Henrik Bang, David Marsh, John Keane and Wolfgang Merkel. To complete this research project, I have benefited from the financial sup- port provided by an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) and an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) both funded by the Australian Government. Over the course of this research project, I published more than 300 questions on the sites of the StackExchange network. I want to acknowledge and also thank all the users (mostly anonymous) who offered their time to answer them. I would not have started this research without Alice Loda. To her I am most indebted. The work of Claire Struthers must be acknowledged as she professionally proofread this thesis. I am also very grateful to Jenna Price, Judith Betts and Adele Webb who read and commented sections of the thesis. I acknowledge that data presented in this thesis have appeared in my previous publication: • Bailo, F. (2015). Mapping online political talks through network analysis: A case study of the website of Italy’s Five Star Movement. Policy Studies, 36(6), 550–572. 7 8 Francesco Bailo Colophon This thesis was typset using LATEX developed by Leslie Lamport and knitr created by Yihui Xie. The data analysis was conducted in R designed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. The following R packages were used for data collection, analysis and re- porting: countrycode by Vincent Arel-Bundock; data.table by M. Dowle, A. Srinivasan, T. Short, S. Lianoglou with contributions from R. Saporta, E Ant- onyan; DBI by R Special Interest Group on Databases; dplyr by Hadley Wick- ham; ergm by Mark S. Handcock; ergm.count by Pavel N. Krivitsky; ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham; ggrepel by Kamil Slowikowski; gridBase by Paul Mur- rell; gridExtra by Baptiste Auguie; haven by Hadley Wickham; httr by Hadley Wickham; igraph by Gábor Csárdi; ineq by Achim Zeileis; intergraph by Michal Bojanowski; koRpus by m.eik michalke; lda by Jonathan Chang; magrittr by Stefan Milton Bache; manifestoR by Jirka Lewandowski; maptools by Roger Bivand; network by Carter T. Butts; plyr by Hadley Wickham; psych by Wil- liam Revelle; RColorBrewer by Erich Neuwirth; RCurl by Duncan Temple Lang and the CRAN team; reshape2 by Hadley Wickham; rgdal by Roger Bivand; rgeos by Roger Bivand; RSelenium by John Harrison; rvest by Hadley Wickham; scales by Hadley Wickham; slopegraph by Thomas Leeper; SnowballC by Milan Bouchet-Valat; sp by Edzer Pebesma; SPARQL by Willem Robert van Hage; sqldf by G. Grothendieck; statnet by Mark S. Handcock; tergm by Pavel N. Krivitsky; tm by Ingo Feinerer; topicmodels by Bettina Grün; viridis by Simon Garnier; xergm by Philip Leifeld; xml2 by Hadley Wickham; zoo by Achim Zeileis; MASS by Brian Ripley; matrix by Douglas Bates and Martin Maechler. 9 10 Francesco Bailo A package to replicate the analysis that appears in this thesis is available at dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NN0TSC. 11 12 Francesco Bailo Quoi qu’il en soit, à l’instant qu’un peuple se donne des représentants, il n’est plus libre ; il n’est plus. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Molte piccole cose, fatte da molta piccola gente, in molti piccoli luoghi, possono cambiare la faccia della terra. Amici di Beppe Grillo di Carcare There is a fine line between social networking and wasting your fucking life. Andy Borowitz 13 14 Contents Contents 15 Contents (detailed) 17 List of figures 23 List of tables 27 1 Introduction 29 2 Literature review 39 3 Methods and challenges for a new kind of data 81 4 (Self)organising mobilisation and participation 129 5 Online deliberative system 189 6 Online deliberative discourse 257 7 Conclusion 301 Bibliography 327 Appendices 361 15 Contents 16 Contents (detailed) Contents . 15 Contents (detailed) . 17 List of figures . 23 List of tables . 27 1 Introduction . 29 2 Literature review . 39 1 The Internet and the transformation of citizen . 39 2 Politics . 42 2.1 Social movements . 42 2.2 Populism . 47 2.3 Political and media crises . 49 3 Citizen . 52 3.1 Inequality, globalisation and citizenry . 52 3.2 Infosphere, onlife and networked individual . 58 4 Participation . 62 4.1 Evolution of political participation . 62 4.2 Evolving contours of political agencies . 63 4.3 Emerging forms of online participation . 66 4.4 Instrumental deliberation and dialogic deliberation . 68 4.5 Communicative action . 69 4.6 Everyday political talk . 71 4.7 Online deliberation . 72 17 Contents (detailed) 5 The case of the M5S............................. 76 5.1 What is it the M5S? ......................... 76 5.2 What the M5S representes for political participation . 79 3 Methods and challenges for a new kind of data . 81 1 Computational social science . 82 1.1 Complexity and modelling . 82 1.2 Understand and predict . 84 1.3 Domain and methods . 86 1.4 A different kind of complexity . 87 2 A new kind of data . 89 2.1 Size and complexity . 89 2.2 Expressive, transactional and relational data . 91 2.3 Objectivity, interpretation and aggregation . 93 2.4 Ethical considerations . 96 2.5 What data is used in the thesis and how . 98 3 Network analysis . 103 3.1 A research paradigm, not a theory . 103 3.2 The field and its toolbox . 105 3.3 Pre-computational network analysis . 111 3.4 Computational network analysis . 115 3.5 Application of network analysis . 116 4 Quantitative text analysis . 118 4.1 Two kinds of expressive data . 118 4.2 Bag of words . 120 4.3 Topic analysis . 124 4.4 Application of text analysis . 126 4 (Self)organising mobilisation and participation . 129 1 Beppe Grillo’s political enterprise . 132 1.1 Blog . 133 1.2 Meetup . 134 18 Francesco Bailo 1.3 V-Day ................................. 138 1.4 Municipal lists . 139 1.5 To the Five Star Movement . 142 1.6 The electoral trajectory of the M5S................. 146 2 The political identity of the M5S...................... 155 2.1 The program of the M5S....................... 155 2.2 Electoral flows . 158 2.3 Trust of M5S voters . 161 3 A new media ecology, and a new media actor . 163 3.1 ICTs diffusion in Italy . 163 3.2 Blog as medium and message . 165 3.3 From blog to community . 168 3.4 The media system . 170 4 Legacy media and the success of the M5S...............
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