An incomplete transition? How Italian politicians manage the celebritisation of politics

Abstract

The celebritisation of politics is a process that depends on both the mass media’s need to find new stories to cover and new stars to build, and the politicians’ need for new forms of visibility to reach their constituency. This article aims to provide an overview of the forms through which the celebratisation of politics has occurred and developed in Italy. By referring to a variety of qualitative data, some of the specificities which characterise the Italian transition towards celebritised politics will be highlighted and analysed. In fact, whereas the members of one of the two main party coalitions – the centre-right coalition – appear to have fully assimilated the new rules of political advertising and promotion, their opponents still experience clear difficulties in managing the new tools of political communication. We argue that these difficulties are due to a still-existent ideological bias that prevents centre-left politicians from adapting their political action to the celebrity codes that are enforced in the political battlefield. The differing approaches of these parties testify to an ongoing transition within Italian politics that appears far from over, despite Berlusconi’s recent withdrawal from the political scene.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.