New media and the crowdsourcing of politics: The strange case of Dr. Berlusconi and Mr. Grillo

Abstract

The main Italian populist politicians, Silvio Berlusconi and Beppe Grillo, ensured their successes in parliamentary elections in 2013 combining a skilful use of electronic media with classical mass rallies, avoiding debates with competitors, and shunning journalists. The message of both Grillo and Berlusconi is characterized by populism, anti-party attitudes, demonization of opponents and an approach to the public and to politics focused on the leader. Although Grillo and Casaleggio emphasize their MoVement’s use of Internet as a direct democracy, claiming that the MoVements politics is created in equal measure by all the members, in a kind of a crowdsourcing, Grillo’s messages remain mostly unidirectional directives, more appropriate to a dictatorial than to a democratic discourse.