Il dibattito sulla migrazione in campagna elettorale: confronto tra il caso francese e italiano

Abstract

Migration has actually gained considerable relevance both in the public and political debate, which in some cases has been associated with a strengthening of nationalist sentiments calling into question the European Union membership. Migration was one of the most relevant topics of the political debate during the French and Italian electoral campaigns, also thanks to the role played by the social media, which has solicited the electoral consensus on the idea that migration may be a risk factor for citizens. In order to analyze the representation and the sentiment on migration characterizing the political debate during the electoral campaign in France and Italy, we collected two samples of messages, in both languages, containing the word migrant produced in the period preceding the vote from the Twitter repository. The messages were collected in two large size corpora, which underwent the Emotional Text Mining. The results comparison shows that Italian and French messages are similar concerning some issues (work, security, exploitation, solidarity) but differ in the sentiment intensity, which is mainly negative in Italy. Finally, if it seems possible to identify a close connection between the election result and the issues debated in France, this association seems less evident in Italy.