Replication Data for: The citizen-user and the crowd-mediated politics of the Five Star Movement

This thesis described the trajectory of the M5S (2005-2014) from the perspective of the citizens who, as Internet users, participated in in the political enterprise. Citizen-users, enabled and empowered by Internet and mobile technologies, sustained the evolution of the movement that ended up being the Five Star Movement (M5S) and shaped its identity. The case study selected for this research, the M5S, is somehow exceptional for the magnitude of its success but its features (Internet-centered and fluid ideology) are not uncommon anymore in political organisations of Western democracies. The goal of the thesis is dual: assessing the impact that the Internet can have on the political process by connecting, mobilising and organising, and characterising the shape of the political talk among users. The thesis applies quantitative methods, including network analysis and natural language processing, on 10 years of user-generated data collected mainly from the blog of the Movement's founder, the M5S official forum, Facebook and Meetup.com. I find that the online discussion fora fostered diversity without fragmentation and contributed in at least one occasion to shape the policy agenda of the M5S. Also, over the years, meetups of the Movement maintained their capacity to attract and mobilise users and their territorial distribution clearly correlate with the local electoral results of the M5S in two elections suggesting a positive electoral impact of Internet-enabled mobilisation. Finally, given the votes received in the general election, the political communication generated over the Internet might have offset the low attention dedicated by TV news broadcast to the Movement during the electoral campaign. Yet no stable community emerged from the online interactions of users but instead a crowd characterised by high volatility and low autonomy from leadership figures.