Topic of the thesis:EU politicization in the 2019 EP election in Germany, Italy, France and Spain: A Twitter-based research design.

Abstract: My research project aims at assessing the degree of politicization of European issues by relying on social media communication in the occasion of the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. I will be focusing on four countries - Germany, France, Italy and Spain – and will investigate whether recent political developments in the EU – such as the Euro-crisis, the Great Recession and the refugee crisis – have fuelled the EU politicization at the time of the elections, thereby questioning the second order nature of EP elections. By looking at Twitter data from and to EP candidates I will be able to disentangle the three main components of EU politicization: salience, contentiousness, and expansion to the public. At the same time, it will be possible to analyze the factors that foster the development of EU politicization during the campaign both at the individual and at the party level, thanks to the interactional nature of Twitter communication. A combination of text analysis techniques and semi-supervised machine learning algorithms will allow me to classify the content of Twitter messages and to sort EU issues relevant content from national topics and from messages referring solely to the EP elections as an event. The subsequent classification on the basis of polarization around content areas will be used to assess the contentiousness dimension. Finally, I will look at the level of expansion by measuring the extent of quoted content (retweets) and replies from the public.

Research interests: EU politicization, EP elections, social media, elite communication.

Graduated from:University of Turin.

Degrees obtained: University of Turin - M.A. in Political Studies and International Relations.

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