Comunicazione politica locale fra influenza personale esocial network

This study analyses the type of communicative relationships that an individual maintains as a member of political parties, trade unions, professional or voluntary associations. The empirical research is based on focus groups and follow-up interviews to elucidate personal views. Focus groups were transcribed and processed with the qualitative software Atlas.ti. (CAQDAS type), which created semantic networks. The findings of this study show that direct interaction with the recipient of a message is most effective. This means that media such as television, radio, newspapers and the Internet offer less access to local networks. There exists a tendency to exploit the short-channel (direct); this suggests that, as far as possible, people avoid intermediate channels. Thus, it does not surprise that the word of mouth has been identified by many interviewees as the preferred channel for transferring political messages. The high mobilization capacity of the word of mouth is particularly effective when one can access a network of contacts, hence bring in the social capital of each group. In the follow-up interviews we find change of habit: some people decided to open their own page on the social network Facebook to discuss political issues. In some cases, interviewees already had a profile on this social network; however they only started to use it to discuss politics during the regional election campaign in February 2009.