Abstract

The electoral campaign for the last Italian general election was the first held during the summer. With voters even more «distracted» and distant from politics and traditional information channels than usual, the relevance of social media as disintermediated means of communication has grown further. The analysis described in this article shows how the trend toward personalization of political communication has experienced further strengthening in that period. Political leaders and political parties have used Twitter in a more structured and articulated way, differentiating their strategies for different purposes and targeting messages (both in terms of topics covered and in terms of communication styles) based on the intended audiences to reach. Therefore, we argue, communication choices reflect the structure of the political offer and the strategic options available to different political actors. The analysis was conducted on the social profiles on Twitter of the main leaders and political parties in Italy, focusing on publicly available messages published in the period between July 21 (the formalization of Draghi’s cabinet crisis) and September 25, 2022 (the election day). Messages have been collected through a Social intelligence platform, enabling the measurement of key quantitative metrics. The qualitative analysis has been conducted on a probabilistic sample of all the published messages