Strategic Use of Social Media by Political Parties: Evidence from Italy

We examine how Italian parties use social media to shape voter priorities and electoral support. We use machine-learning techniques to identify immigration- and economy-related events in news, which we link to parties’ online messaging, issue salience, and polling data. High-frequency analysis shows that the social media communication campaign by the Italian right-wing populist party sharply raises immigration salience, along with its electoral support. A structural model of political competition informed by the relationships uncovered by our reduced-form indicates that strategic online communication explains more of the support for the party than events, highlighting the central role of online political communication.