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McCormick opposes Machiavelli's democratic republicanism and Rousseau's aristocratic republicanism by showing that Machiavelli and Rousseau have a very different view of the republican institutions of Rome. Why does Rousseau's "tale of Rome" differ form Machiavelli's "tale of Rome"? Why does Rousseau repudiate Machiavelli's more democratic reconstruction of the Roman Republic? And more generally, why does Rousseau devote so many pages to the republican institutions of Rome? He is looking at Rome to describe a kind of democracy or a kind of aristocracy?

This article sheds light on Machiavelli's view of friendship as a political relationship. As the comparison between Platina's De Principe and Machiavelli's The Prince makes clear, the political anthropology, the political ontology and the vision of the world on which Machiavelli realistic idea of politics hinges imply that neither the relationship between a prince and his subjects nor that between the prince and his chosen advisers can be conceived as a form of friendship. What is at stake is not only a new conception of the political meanings and functions of the relationship between a prince and his subjects, according to which friends are unreliable and dangerous allies, but also a new way of conceiving politics, which revolves around the choice of enemies.

L'articolo offre una prima ricostruzione della funzione che ha l'amicizia nella comunità di Clarens attraverso la discussione critica degli studi di Starobinski e di altri autorevoli interpreti del pensiero politico di Rousseau.

Motivated by the literature on 'competing principals', this article studies the effect of interactive social networking sites on the behavior of politicians. For this purpose, 12,455 comments posted on the Facebook walls of 423 Italian MPs have been analyzed to assess whether Facebook played a role in the selection of the Italian Head of State in 2013, enhancing responsiveness. The statistical analysis reveals that the pressure exerted through social media did not affect MPs' propensity to express public dissent over the party line, which is instead affected by more traditional 'principals' and factors: seniority, primary elections, and factional membership.

Scholars have emphasized the need to deepen investigation of intraparty politics. Recent studies look at social media as a source of information on the ideological preferences of politicians and political actors. In this regard, the present article tests whether social media messages published by politicians are a suitable source of data. It applies quantitative text analysis to the public statements released by politicians on social media in order to measure intraparty heterogeneity and assess its effects. Three different applications to the Italian case are discussed. Indeed, the content of messages posted online is informative on the ideological preferences of politicians and proved to be useful to understand intraparty dynamics. Intraparty divergences measured through social media analysis explain: (a) a politician's choice to endorse one or another party leader, (b) a politician's likelihood to switch off from his or her parliamentary party group; and (c) a politician's probability to be appointed as a minister.

This article investigates intra-party politics and explores the determinants of factional breakaways, going beyond the unitary actor assumption. It presents a game-theoretic model that focuses on intra-party competition and bargaining dynamics to analyse the interplay between party leaders and minority factions. It tests several hypotheses based on the formal model using a new dataset that contains information about the strength and policy positions of factions inside Italian parties, from 1946 to 2011, measured through quantitative content analysis of motions presented during party congresses. The results show that office, policy and electoral motives influence factions' decisions to break away. Other elements - such as intra-party democracy, the electoral system and party system competitiveness - also affect leaders' attitudes toward compromising and alter the likelihood of a split.

This article analyses Platina's De honesta voluptate et valetudine as an emblematic example of how an accurate philological analysis can help to clarify the theoretical contexts in which a work can be placed and even provide a clearer grasp of its philosophical assumptions. In this literary work, which is both a cookbook and a dietetic manual, Platina interwove a variety of ancient and modern sources, more or less easily discernible: he did not limit himself to collect Martino of Como's recipes, but crossed the threshold of the kitchen by combining the teaching of medieval dietetics, which was based on Galen's theory of bodily humours, with some Stoic assumptions, which he viewed as not being in conflict with a moderate pursuit of the pleasure of eating. In doing so, he developed an intriguing reflection on living well according to which happiness tends to coincide with physical wellbeing.

This paper examines the changes in political language that occurred after 1989 in Italy and focuses on textual documents drafted by intra-party subgroups between 1946 and 2010 that were related to the internal debates of Italian political parties. These documents, which are addressed to party members and activists rather than the wider public, have been analyzed through quantitative text analysis of word frequencies. The results confirm that a few relevant changes occurred that involve the lexicon, tone, and content of messages. However, concepts such as left and right are still relevant, and we observed neither a strong decline in the use of ideological terms nor a wider usage of populist words. Despite the growing personalization of politics, the main political leaders are not frequently mentioned, with two exceptions: Prodi and Berlusconi. Overall, there is a distance between intra-party politics and the logic of entertainment.

Front Matter -- Copyright -- Contents -- Figures -- Tables -- Contributors -- Preface -- PART I SUBJECTS AND SUBFIELDS -- Agenda-setting research in the age of social media -- Clicktivism, slacktivism and connective action -- Cybersecurity -- Digitally networked protests -- E-campaigning and elections -- E-democracy -- Electoral predictions from social media data -- Internet and political participation -- Nowcasting and forecasting with Big Data -- Populism and social media -- Social media and autocracy -- Social media and political trust -- Social media and public health -- Social media revolution versus normalization -- Social TV and second screen -- Terrorism and online extremism -- Violence, conflict, war and social media -- PART II METHODS -- Digital trace data analysis -- Technicity-of-the-mediums -- Data collection: APIs and scraping -- Audio as data -- Image as data and visual methods -- Text as data -- Scaling models in politicalscience -- Sentiment analysis and opinion mining -- Topic models -- Mobile positioning data -- Machine learning and deep learning -- Qualitative methods -- Digital ethnography -- Social network analysis -- PART III ACTORS -- Activated public opinion -- Algorithm, machine learning and artificial intelligence -- Bots -- Digital advocacy -- Digital parties -- Fact-checking -- Hacktivists -- Hyperleaders -- Political influencers -- Social media analytics companies -- Trolls -- Voting advice applications -- WikiLeaks and whistleblowers -- PART IV CORE KEYWORDS -- Big Data -- Censorship online -- Data journalism -- Deep Web and Dark Web -- Digital public sphere -- Disinformation -- Echo chambers -- Fake news -- Filter bubbles -- Hashtag politics -- Microtargeting -- Misinformation -- (Non-)representativeness of social media data -- Online political hostility -- Open data -- Post-truth -- Viral political marketing.

This book illustrates how social media platforms enable us to understand everyday politics and evaluates the extent to which they can foster accountability, transparency and responsiveness. The first part focuses on accountability and tests whether the offline behavior of politicians is consistent with their online declarations, showing that textual analysis of politicians' messages is useful to explain phenomena such as endorsements, party splits and appointments to cabinet. The second part concerns responsiveness. By means of sentiment analysis, it investigates the shape of the interaction between citizens and politicians determining whether politicians' behavior is influenced by the pressure exerted on social media both on policy and non-policy issues. Finally, the book evaluates whether a responsive behavior is successful in restoring online political trust, narrowing the gap between voters and political elites. The book will be of use to students, scholars and practitioners interested in party organization, intra-party politics, legislative politics, social media analysis and political communication, as well as politicians themselves

"This book illustrates how social media platforms enable us to understand everyday politics and evaluates the extent to which they can foster accountability, transparency and responsiveness. The first part focuses on accountability and tests whether the offline behavior of politicians is consistent with their online declarations, showing that textual analysis of politicians' messages is useful to explain phenomena such as endorsements, party splits and appointments to cabinet. The second part concerns responsiveness. By means of sentiment analysis, it investigates the shape of the interaction between citizens and politicians determining whether politicians' behavior is influenced by the pressure exerted on social media both on policy and non-policy issues. Finally, the book evaluates whether a responsive behavior is successful in restoring online political trust, narrowing the gap between voters and political elites. The book will be of use to students, scholars and practitioners interested in party organization, intra-party politics, legislative politics, social media analysis and political communication, as well as politicians themselves"--