Abstract
In this chapter, I conduct a semantic analysis of the 10-year evolution of the discussion around the guaranteed minimum income and compare the adoption of concepts by users and by the leadership of the Five Star Movement and estimate the policy impact of the online conversation. I describe a natural language processing method to compare a large corpus of texts to a selection of key concepts and to understand their reciprocal relations by placing them in a concept space.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
According to the last survey conducted, among contributors to the Italian Wikipedia, 86% are male, 49% have a university degree (Wikimedia, 2012).
- 2.
More specifically I downloaded the following database backup dumps from dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html: itwiki-20160203-pages-articles.xml, itwiki-20160203-pagelinks.sql, itwiki-20160203-categorylinks.sql and itwiki-20160203-langlinks.sql.
- 3.
The term-document matrix was computed with the function TermDocumentMatrix(corpus, control = list(weighting = function(x) weightTfIdf(x, normalize = TRUE))) from the R package tm (Feinerer, Hornik, & Meyer, 2008).
- 4.
During a Senate hearing to provide an opinion on the M5S bill, ISTAT also pointed to the inexactness of the terminology adopted by the M5S in labelling its policy, which is “denominated citizen’s income, but in this case amounts to a selective measure, limiting payments of benefits to households with an income below a determined threshold” (Alleva, 2015, p. 6).
- 5.
Taking into account that in practice the GMI was recurrently—although improperly—referred to as citizen’s income by news media and political movements, I searched the corpora of news media and political texts for both phrases. I refer here to GMI, independently from the proponents’ own denomination, if the proposed benefit is conditional on the actual income of the recipient.
- 6.
- 7.
In the case of the Senate only bills were collected because it was not possible to link acts to MPs in the Senate’s archive.
- 8.
The archive of la Repubblica also returns results for articles that appeared in the local sections of the newspaper.
- 9.
In the biographical page of his blog, Domenico De Simone openly distances himself from academia. He wrote that his views “are strongly opposed by the academic establishment” (de Simone, n.d.).
- 10.
Formally for vectors \( \overrightarrow{V}\left({d}_1\right) \) and \( \overrightarrow{V}\left({d}_1\right) \) of documents d1 and d2 we compute the cosine similarity wth the formula \( sim\left({d}_1,{d}_2\right)=\frac{\overrightarrow{V}\left({d}_1\right)\bullet \overrightarrow{V}\left({d}_1\right)}{\mid \overrightarrow{V}\left({d}_1\right)\Big\Vert \overrightarrow{V}\left({d}_2\right)\mid } \).
- 11.
Again, the weight of a concept category is computed by averaging all the concepts of the category.
- 12.
In the third paragraph of the introductory part of the bill, the M5S lawmakers wrote: “It is necessary to act now to change course and focus political action on the welfare of the citizens, first recognising basic rights: the opportunity and capabilities needed to live a decent life, the right to work, education, information and culture.”
References
Alleva, G. (2015). Audizione del Presidente dell’Istituto nazionale di statistica Giorgio Alleva. Roma. Retrieved from http://www.senato.it/application/xmanager/projects/leg17/attachments/documento_evento_procedura_commissione/files/000/002/810/1148_Memorie_ISTAT.pdf
Boeri, T., & Perotti, R. (2013). Reddito di cittadinanza e reddito minimo garantito. Lavoce.info. Retrieved from http://www.lavoce.info/archives/7397/reddito-di-cittadinanza-e-reddito-minimo-garantito/
Buontempo, T. (1994). Delega al Governo per l’emanazione di norme in materia di rivalutazione degli assegni familiari e di reddito minimo garantito per le casalinghe e per i cittadini privi di qualsiasi reddito. Retrieved from http://dati.camera.it/ocd/attocamera.rdf/ac12_366
Buzzi, E. (2012). Al comizio di Grillo c’è anche Casaleggio: Noi forse la prima forza. Corriere Della Sera, 11. Retrieved from http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2012/novembre/17/comizio_Grillo_anche_Casaleggio_noi_co_0_20121117_098b350c-307f-11e2-9e65-0edbbab2bd0c.shtml
Camera dei Deputati. (2016). Dati.camera.it. Text. Retrieved from http://dati.camera.it/it/
Catalfo, N. (2013). Istituzione del reddito di cittadinanza nonché delega al Governo per l’introduzione del salario minimo orario. Retrieved from http://www.senato.it/leg/17/BGT/Schede/Ddliter/42593.htm
Constitution of the Italian Republic. (1948). Retrieved from https://www.senato.it/documenti/repository/istituzione/costituzione_inglese.pdf
de Simone, D. (n.d.). Biografia. Domenico De Simone. Retrieved from https://domenicods.wordpress.com/biografia/
Egozi, O., Markovitch, S., & Gabrilovich, E. (2011). Concept-based information retrieval using explicit semantic analysis. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 29(2), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/1961209.1961211
Emanuele, B. (2012). L’agenda di Grillo Referendum sull’euro e stop alla Tav. Corriere Della Sera, 6. Retrieved from http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2012/dicembre/28/agenda_Grillo_Referendum_sull_euro_co_0_20121228_6677de58-50b6-11e2-bee4-ef878887f0da.shtml
Esposito, G. (2009). Reddito minimo di cittadinanza. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/listeciviche/forum/2009/03/reddito-minimo-di-cittadinanza.html
Feinerer, I., Hornik, K., & Meyer, D. (2008). Text mining infrastructure in R. Journal of Statistical Software, 25(5), 1–54. Retrieved from http://text-analysis.googlecode.com/files/Text_Mining_Infrastructure_in_R.pdf
Gabrilovich, E., & Markovitch, S. (2007). Computing semantic relatedness using Wikipedia-based explicit semantic analysis. In IJCAI (Vol. 7, pp. 1606–1611). Retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/Papers/IJCAI/2007/IJCAI07-259.pdf
Giannattasio, M. (2012). Donne, ambiente e legalità. La sfida nel centrosinistra. Corriere Della Sera, 2–3.
Giunta Regionale della Campania. (2004). Istituzione in via sperimentale del reddito di cittadinanza. Retrieved from http://www.sito.regione.campania.it/leggi_regionali2004/lr02_04abrogata.pdf
Gramazio, D. (1999). Riforma del sistema fiscale e istituzione del reddito di cittadinanza. Retrieved from http://dati.camera.it/ocd/attocamera.rdf/ac13_6520
Grillo, B. (2011). Il debito della Madonna. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2011/11/la_schiavitu_de_1.html
Grillo, B. (2012a). L’Agenda Grillo. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2012/12/lagenda_grillo.html
Grillo, B. (2012b). La logica di Mr. Spock – Stiglitz e Gallegati. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2012/08/la_logica_di_mr_spock_-_stiglitz_e_gallegati.html
Grillo, B. (2012c). Uno su quattro non ce la fa. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2012/02/uno_su_quattro.html
Grillo: “Monti presuntuoso”. Contro-Agenda in 16 punti. (2012d). La Repubblica. Retrieved from http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2012/12/27/news/agenda_grillo-49548552/
Grillo, B. (2013a). 5 Giorni a 5 Stelle/17: Il M5S presenta all’Italia il #RedditoDiCittadinanza. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2013/11/5_giorni_a_5_stelle17_redditodicittadinanza.html
Grillo, B. (2013b). Il M5S al Quirinale. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2013/03/il_m5s_al_quirinale.html
Grillo, B. (2013c). M5S Senato: Reddito di cittadinanza subito! Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2013/06/il_m5s_presenta_il_reddito_di_cittadinanza.html
Grillo, B. (2013d). Risultati del sondaggio “Nessuno deve rimanere indietro”. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/2013/02/risultati_del_s.html
Kingdon, J. W. (1995). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Longman.
Manning, C. D., Raghavan, P., & Schütze, H. (2008). Introduction to information retrieval. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Mastrangeli, M. (2011). Proponiamo revisione costituzionale per esplicitare diritto a beni e servizi minimi garantiti, mediante espropriazione e tassazione di chi ha di più. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/listeciviche/forum/2011/12/proponiamo-revisione-costituzionale-per-esplicitare-diritto-a-beni-e-servizi-minimi-garantiti-median.html
Milne, D., & Witten, I. H. (2013). An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia. Artificial Intelligence, 194, 222–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2012.06.007
Morra, N. (2013). Mozione 1-00089. Retrieved from http://www.senato.it/japp/bgt/showdoc/frame.jsp?tipodoc=Sindisp&leg=17&id=703964
Movimento 5 Stelle. (2009). Programma (versione 2.0). Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.beppegrillo.it
Movimento 5 Stelle. (2013). Programma. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/uploads/attach/file/5232/32956_2013.pdf
Movimento 5 Stelle. (2015). Programma. Blog di Beppe Grillo. Retrieved from http://www.beppegrillo.it/iniziative/movimentocinquestelle/Programma-Movimento-5-Stelle.pdf
Russo Spena, G. (1989). Norme per l’istituzione del reddito minimo garantito. Retrieved from http://dati.camera.it/ocd/attocamera.rdf/ac10_3664
Senato della Repubblica. (2016). Dati.senato.it. Text. Retrieved from http://dati.camera.it/it/
Stella, G. A. (2010). «La Sicilia salvatevela da soli» Grillo dà la carica al suo popolo. Corriere Della Sera, 15. Retrieved from http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2012/ottobre/26/Sicilia_salvatevela_soli_Grillo_carica_co_0_20121026_da895a12-1f2c-11e2-9bc3-31c3a4d6bf36.shtml
Van der Maaten, L., & Hinton, G. (2008). Visualizing data using t-SNE. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 9(2579–2605), 85. Retrieved from http://siplab.tudelft.nl/sites/default/files/vandermaaten08a.pdf
Van Parijs, P. (2004). Basic income: A simple and powerful idea for the Twenty-First Century. Politics & Society, 32(1), 7–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329203261095
Volkens, A., Lehmann, P., Merz, N., Regel, S., & Werner, A. (2014). The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Version 2014b. Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung (WZB). Retrieved from https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/
Wikimedia. (2012). Wikipedia Editor Survey 2012. Retrieved from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bailo, F. (2020). The M5S Community and Citizen’s Income. In: Online Communities and Crowds in the Rise of the Five Star Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45508-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45508-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45507-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45508-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)