Share and Shout: Discovering Proto-Slogans in Online Political Communities

This paper proposes a methodology for investigating populism by analyzing proto-slogans, nominal utterances (NUs) typical of a political community on social media. We extracted more than 700.000 comments from the public Facebook pages of two Italian populist parties’ leaders (Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio) during the week preceding the 2019 European elections (i.e., from May 20 to May 26, 2019). These comments have been automatically clustered and manually annotated to find protoslogans coming from the parties’ supporters (bottom-up). We applied four layers of analysis: Nominal Utterances (NUs), a syntactic device widely used for slogans; Slogans for NUs with a slogan function; Top-down/Bottom-up, to recognize the slogans produced by the politicians and those produced by supporters; Protoslogans, for NUs devoid of specific political content while expressing partisanship and support for the leaders.