THE PERSONALIZATION OF LEADERSHIP IN LIGHT OF THE CHANGE IN COMMUNICATION PROCESSES IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS. THE ITALIAN CASE With the changing of social, economic and productive structures, parties and their role in society have also transformed. On one hand,
decision-making bodies have shifted (moving from the national to the supranational setting), on the other hand large mass organizations, born during industrialization, large factories and mass society have proved inadequate to fast changing times and globalization. (Saccà, 2013).
Political parties have progressively lost their centrality in favour of the “boss”: leadership has thus assumed a key role in a new process increasingly
characterized by personalization and mediatization of politics (Mazzoleni and Schultz, 1999). This dynamic has been emphasized by the use of social networks. A season of individualism has begun: the parties that crowd the democratic scene are often so tied to the "boss" that they do not survive his end (Calise, 2019).
In this scenario, communication, storytelling, political marketing have become crucial. We are witnessing the dawn of new self-representation mechanisms shaped by new technologies, within a digital ecosystem dominated by algorithms in which a single point of view is increasingly privatized and personalized. At the end of the era of great narratives, the mass audience has been replaced by a myriad of "audiences", driven by fragmentation mechanisms that have increased the risk of social isolation and ideological segregation, entrenching in self-referential bubbles (Pariser, 2011) or in echo chambers (Sunstein, 2017).
This research project aims to study how the personalization of politics changes over time and how it is emphasized by the use of social networks, an ever more widespread medium of communication in the processes of political phenomena. In particular, we will focus on the relationship between political communication and the transformations of leadership and parties, hence focusing on two different forms of populism represented by Lega and Movimento Cinque Stelle, in the very person of Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio. The analysis will begin from the first
parliamentary term - started with the elections of March 4, 2018 - which saw Salvini and Di Maio allies on the government (in the so-called yellow-green executive). Later, we will meet them as opponents, due to Lega crossing the floor and the creation of a new government consisting by Liberi e Uguali, the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement . This study will analyze the social communication strategies of the two opposing populist leaders starting from the first yellow-green experience, extending to recent times, in order to understand whether and how communication should be diversified after the end of an alliance between two political parties. The hypothesis at the basis of this work, to be verified, is that both the opposing leaders, Di Maio and Salvini, set up a social communication strategy aiming the mobilization of "circles", "bubbles", factions characterized by homophily, and that the
subsequent dynamic further strengthens the processes of personalization of politics, fixing ideological, stylistic and strategic traits of populism.
Keywords: populism, democracy, leadership