Social Inclusion in the Contemporary Italian Online Public Discourse

This chapter delves into contemporary political communication in Italy through a gendered lens, specifically focusing on the Twitter-X activity of over 700 Italian politicians spanning from January 2020 to April 2022. The objective is to comprehend how gender affects the volume, the degree of engagement, the style and the content of political communications shared online. In doing so, it casts a light on how social inclusion takes form in contemporary Italian online public discourse on Twitter-X. The literature review sets the stage by outlining the challenges and disparities faced by women in ‘offline politics’, underscoring the gap between descriptive and substantive representation. Indeed, despite an increase in female representation, gender gaps persist, affecting recruitment, electoral conditions, pres-tige of positions in political institutions and specialisation across policy issues. The chapter then shifts its focus to ‘online politics’, exploring gender differences in the Italian political Twitter-X sphere. First, the analysis examines the numerical repre-sentation of female politicians in this social network and evaluates their effectiveness in message dissemination by comparing engagement metrics with their male coun-terparts. Second, a psycholinguistic analysis, utilising the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary, explores language differences between male and female politicians, offering insights into their communication strategies. Finally, we delve into the topics covered in their posts in terms of saliency and emphasised sub-issues.