Abstract
Many authors agree that the President of the Italian Republic is the head of state with the widest powers among parliamentary governments in Europe. Although several studies have sought to explain Why the President’s power may increase or decrease, a quantitative measurement of the phenomenon—able to answer questions also about the Who (the actors), How (the modalities) and How much (the consistency) of the phenomenon itself—has seldom been carried out by scholars. This paper seeks to answer these unanswered substantive questions by measuring the potential power of the Italian head of state in a crucial case—the first Presidency of Giorgio Napolitano (2006–2013)—by means of a quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) and a social network analysis of his Diary. This is done in a semi-automated way by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including regular expressions and named-entity recognition. As regards the methodological contribution of the paper, its aim is to demonstrate that QNA with NLP tools for semi-automated analysis of textual data can be considered an effective and reliable methodology for the empirical investigation of potential power, enabling a more widespread application of this technique in the quantitative analysis of topics related to the power approach—that some scholars consider otherwise obsolete—also at the comparative level.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Source: own data processing
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Source: own data processing. Image: PC-ACE
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Henceforth we will use the singular masculine pronoun he to refer to the PoR (instead of the form s/he, previously used throughout the text referring to the Italian Constitution) because in Italy, since 1948 to the present time, there have been no women elected as PoR.
Available online at: http://presidenti.quirinale.it/elementi/Elenchi.aspx?tipo=Visita.
Available online with a free license at: www.pc-ace.com.
Not in all democratic states do presidential diaries—be they of heads of state, heads of government, or both—exist at the same level of detail and/or are available for public consultation. E.g., in the United States of America, where the research on the presidential agenda is for various reasons the state of art of this kind of empirical analysis (Edwards and Wayne 1990; Link and Kegley 1993), the presidents’ diaries are available online at the website of the White House Historical Association: available at https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-presidents-daily-diary. The level of detail of the diaries varies from president to president. In some cases, e.g. the presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, those registers list minute by minute all contacts had by each president with other persons, including telephone appointments, in addition to face to face ones. In other cases, like the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson presidencies, the level of detail and the diaries’ completeness is lesser or is not extended to all years of their presidential term of office. For example, this is the case of President George H.W. Bush, for whom only the two-year period 1989–1990 is available. Lastly, the diaries of the presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Trump were still not available online at the time of the website consultation, while in regard to president Clinton only daily summaries including what the president intended to do and not only what he really did were available at the time of our visit.
Napolitano is the first to have been elected twice as the Italian PoR (in 2006 and 2013). He was elected for the first time on 10 May 2006, with a majority of 543 votes out of 1009 election assembly members. He obtained the votes of the representatives of centre-left parties, which at the time had entered into the Unione (Tebaldi 2014b, p. 562). He has been senator for life since 2005, and he was previously an elected member of the parliament (1953–1996), president of the Chamber of Deputies (1992–1994), Minister of the Interior (1996–1998), and member of the European Parliament (1999–2004).
Scraping is a process used to extract information from web pages. We developed an ad-hoc script for this task. In particular, we used the wget tool to download the data from the Web at specified URLs.
NLP is a research sector of computer science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics dealing with human–machine interactions and, in particular, the processing of natural language data.
In relation to the project’s significance on the basis of the semantic triplets obtained see Franzosi (2010, pp. 139–140).
E.g., if the actor was part of a majority or minority group in the Italian parliament, which was obtainable only through consultation of information exogenous with respect to that contained in the Diary.
The reader is advised that, because in our coding scheme the What consists in the action of each presidential meeting, it is considered to be an implicit constant of the research (it is simply always meet). Hence, for this reason, the What will be skipped in what follows of our description.
During Napolitano’s first term of office, three governments followed each other. The Prodi government remained in office 734 days, from 6 May 2006 to 8 May 2008. The Berlusconi IV government was in office 1288 days from 8 May 2008 to 16 November 2011. The Monti government remained in office 530 days, from 16 November 2011 to 28 April 2013.
In the case of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, in addition to the post of minister, deputy minister and undersecretary, also the post of secretary general was considered.
References
Amoretti, F., Giannone, D.: The power of words: the changing role of the Italian head of state during the second republic. Mod. Italy 19(4), 439–455 (2014)
Battegazzorre, F.: Some reflections on the power to/power over debate. J. Polit. Power 10(3), 274–285 (2017)
Best, J.J.: Who talked to the president when? A study of Lyndon B. Johnson. Polit. Sci. Q. 103(3), 531–545 (1988)
Best, J.J.: Who talked with President Kennedy? An interaction analysis. Pres. Stud. Q. 22(2), 351–369 (1992)
Calise, M.: La personalizzazione presidenziale. Il Mulino 62(3), 460–468 (2013)
Calise, M.: La democrazia del leader. Laterza & Figli, Roma-Bari (2016)
Cheli, E.: Il capo dello Stato: un ruolo da ripensare? Il Mulino 62(3), 436–443 (2013)
Collobert, R., Weston, J., Bottou, L., Karlen, M., Kavukcuoglu, K., Kuksa, P.: Natural language processing (almost) from scratch. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 12, 2493–2537 (2011)
Corbetta, P.: Metodologia e tecniche della ricerca sociale. Il Mulino, Bologna (1999)
Diani, M.: Networks and social movements: a research programme. In: Diani, M., McAdam, D. (eds.) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, pp. 299–319. Oxford University Press, New York (2003)
Duverger, M.: A new political system model: semi-presidential government. Eur. J. Polit. Res. 8(2), 165–187 (1980)
Eckstein, H.: Case studies and theory in political science. In: Converse, P.E., Greenstein, F.I., Polsby, N.W. (eds.) Handbook of Political Science: Vol. 7. Political Science: Scope and Theory, pp. 94–137. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1975)
Edwards III, G.C., Wayne, S.J.: Presidential Leadership: Politics and Policy Making, 2nd edn. St. Martins Press, New York (1990)
Elgie, R.: The French presidency: Conceptualizing presidential power in the fifth republic. Public Adm. 74(2), 275–291 (1996)
Emirbayer, M., Goodwin, J.: Network analysis, culture, and the problem of agency. Am. J. Sociol. 99(6), 1411–1454 (1994)
Franzosi, R.: Narrative as data: linguistic and statistical tools for the quantitative study of historical events. Int. Rev. Soc. Hist. 43(S6), 81–104 (1998)
Franzosi, R.: The return of the actor. Interaction networks among social actors during periods of high mobilization (Italy, 1919–1922). Mobil. Int. Q. 4(2), 131–149 (1999)
Franzosi, R.: From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2004)
Franzosi, R.: Quantitative Narrative Analysis. Sage, Thousand Oaks (2010)
Franzosi, R., De Fazio, G., Vicari, S.: Ways of measuring agency: an application of quantitative narrative analysis to lynchings in Georgia (1875–1930). Sociol. Methodol. 42(1), 1–42 (2012)
Georg, A.L., Bennett, A.: Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. MIT Press, Cambridge (2005)
Gerring, J.: Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge University Press, New York (2006)
Grimaldi, S.: Italy in the narration of President Napolitano. Comunicazione Politica 12(1), 73–94 (2011a)
Grimaldi, S.: The role of Italian presidents: the subtle boundary between accountability and political action. Bull. Italian Politics 3(1), 103–125 (2011b)
Grimaldi, S.: The President during the so-called Second Republic: from veto player to first in command? Contemp. Italian Politics 7(1), 76–92 (2015)
Grimaldi, S.: The leadership capital of Italian presidents: the politics of constraints and moral suasion. In: Bennister, M., Hart, P.T., Worthy, B. (eds.) The Leadership Capital Index. A New Perspective on Political Leadership, pp. 226–249. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2017)
Hopcroft, J.E., Motwani, R., Ullman, J.D.: Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. Pearson/Addison-Wesley, Boston (2006)
Ieraci, G.: Teoria dei governi e democrazia. Ruoli, risorse e arene istituzionali. Il Mulino, Bologna (2003)
Knoke, D., Yang, S.: Social Network Analysis. Sage, Thousand Oaks (2008)
Lansdall-Welfare, T., Sudhahar, S., Thompson, J., Cristianini, N.: The actors of history: narrative network analysis reveals the Institutions of Power in British Society between 1800–1950. In: Adams, N., Tucker, A., Weston, D. (eds.) Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XVI. IDA 2017, pp. 186–197. Springer, Cham (2017)
Link, M.W., Kegley, C.W.: Is access influence? Measuring adviser-presidential interactions in light of the Iranian hostage crisis. Int. Interact. 18(4), 343–364 (1993)
Lippolis, V., Salerno, G.M.: La repubblica del Presidente. Il settennato di Giorgio Napolitano. Il Mulino, Bologna (2013)
Manning, C.D., Schütze, H.: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Mura, S.: Antonio Segni. La politica e le istituzioni. Il Mulino, Bologna (2017)
Nenni, P., Nenni, G., Zucàro, D.: I diari di Pietro Nenni, 1943–1971: Tempo di guerra fredda, diari 1943–1956, vol. 1. SugarCo, Milan (1981)
Nenni, P., Nenni, G., Zucàro, D.: I diari di Pietro Nenni, 1943–1971: Gli anni del centro sinistra, diari 1957–1966, vol. 2. SugarCo, Milan (1982)
Pasquino, G., Valbruzzi, M.: Post-electoral politics in Italy: institutional problems and political perspectives. J. Mod. Italian Stud. 18(4), 466–484 (2013)
Pasquino, G.: Italian presidents and their accordion: pre-1992 and post-1994. Parliam. Affairs 65(4), 845–860 (2012)
Pasquino, G.: The election of the eleventh president of the Italian Republic. J. Mod. Italian Stud. 11(4), 532–542 (2006)
Poguntke, T., Webb, P.: The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2007)
Provan, K.G.: Recognizing, measuring, and interpreting the potential/enacted power distinction in organizational research. Acad. Manag. Rev. 5(4), 549–559 (1980)
Rumor, M.: Memorie (1943–1970). Neri Pozza, Vicenza (1991)
Shugart, M.S., Carey, J.M.: Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1992)
Sigelman, L., McNeil, D.M.: White House decision-making under stress. Am. J. Polit. Sci. 24(4), 652–673 (1980)
Stoppino, M.: Potere e teoria politica. Ecig, Genova (1982)
Tebaldi, M.: Il Presidente della Repubblica. Il Mulino, Bologna (2005)
Tebaldi, M.: Poteri e prassi del Presidente della Repubblica nel sistema politico italiano. Interpretazioni dell’esperienza maggioritaria. Diritto e Questioni Pubbliche 11(3), 417–462 (2011)
Tebaldi, M.: Il potere di esternazione del capo dello Stato nella Seconda Repubblica. Comunicazione Politica 15(3), 485–505 (2014a)
Tebaldi, M.: From notary to ruler: The role of the president of the republic during the italian crisis (2010–2014). South European Society and Politics 19(4), 561–581 (2014b)
Tebaldi, M., Calaresu, M., Purpura, A.: Con chi parla il Presidente? Un'analisi relazionale del Diario di Giorgio Napolitano (2006–2013). Comunicazione Politica 19(3), 333–372 (2018)
Wada, T.: Event analysis of claim making in Mexico. How are social protests transformed into political protests? Mobil. Int. Q. 9(3), 241–257 (2004)
Wasserman, S., Faust, K.: Social Network Analysis. Methods and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1994)
Acknowledgements
This article is the result of joint research undertaken by the three authors. Mauro Tebaldi primarily wrote Sects. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.1, 7.1; Marco Calaresu primarily wrote Sects. 6, 6.2, 6.2.2, 7.2; Alberto Purpura wrote Sect. 6.2.1. All the authors jointly wrote Sects. 1 and 8, reviewed and approved the final version of the paper, including figures and tables, notes, references, and Appendices. Alberto Purpura and Marco Calaresu developed from scratch the information extraction, the data analysis algorithms and the procedures for data visualization to create the figures and tables of the paper. We would like to thank the graduating students of the Department of Political Sciences, Communication Sciences and Information Engineering/Department of Law at University of Sassari employed in the Research Lab “Analisi Presidente della Repubblica e Presidente della Regione Sardegna” (APRE2), for their hard work and commitment to the project for the years 2016–2018. Last but not least, we would also like to thank the two anonymous referees for their detailed and constructive remarks to our work. As usual, all errors remain ours.
Funding
The research has been funded by the project entitled “Processi di Presidenzializzazione: la Presidenza della Repubblica italiana e della Regione Sardegna” (Scientific Coordinator: Mauro Tebaldi; Project Coordinator: Marco Calaresu), sponsored by the Regione Autonoma della Sardegna under the Law 7/2007, “Promozione della ricerca scientifica e dell’innovazione tecnologica in Sardegna” (CUP: J72I15000080007 – CRP: 79130 – Codice UGOV: LR72013TEBALDI). Leading institution: University of Sassari, Department of Political Sciences, Communication Sciences and Information Engineering/Department of Law. Total duration of the project: 36 months (2016–2019).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendices
Appendix 1: Examples of semantic triplets extracted from the PoR’s Diary
Appendix 2
In the following Tables 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, we report the labels used in the figures of the manuscript in order to provide a correspondence with the original institution names in Italian language. This choice was made in order to prevent misleading translations of the labels, which often refer to institutions, or entities that are unique for the Italian political system, and to facilitate the reproducibility of our research in other languages than English and Italian. Finally, in all the figures, “Presidente della Repubblica” has always been translated as “President of the Republic” (PoR).
Appendix 3
In the following Table 8, we report the names of the considered ministries as they possibly change under different governments (2006–2013). We decided to aggregate different labelled ministries referring to the same policy area under the same label in our coding scheme (the labels are shown in detail in Appendix 4), reporting here all of the names used in the Diary to refer to them.
Appendix 4
In the following scheme are reported in bold all the recognized categories at different aggregation levels used in the data coding stage. The terms not in bold represent the values which can be added under each category.
Appendix 5
The parser used to process the data in the Diary was written in Java and performed all the tasks necessary to identify the names and the roles of the actors with whom the President of the Republic interacts. In order to do so, we wrote a few regular expressions to identify the surnames of the actors and a few simple rules like “the name of a person always precedes his/her surname” or “the role of an actor always follows his/her name”. These and a few more rules, combined with the regular writing style of the Diary, allowed us to extract the information from the data with great accuracy. For this extremely domain-specific research we could not employ other pre-trained models for NER such as the ones available in Spacy (https://spacy.io/models/it). In fact, these models are trained on very general domains such as Wikipedia articles or news; and to identify only the most popular named-entity categories such as dates, location names etc. In order to employ these models for our task, we would have had to re-train them on our domain-specific corpus. Furthermore, to perform the training, we would have had to create a large set (thousands) of labelled training samples featuring the named-entity labels that we employ in our research, but were missing in the public model (i.e. the roles of political actors). For the above reasons, we opted for the development of an ad-hoc and simpler tool for NER.
The source code of our task- and domain-specific approach for NER is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/albpurpura/AgendaParser.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tebaldi, M., Calaresu, M. & Purpura, A. The power of the President: a quantitative narrative analysis of the Diary of an Italian head of state (2006–2013). Qual Quant 53, 3063–3095 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-019-00920-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-019-00920-7