Welcome to the website of the Echo CHambers, Opinions and Behaviors in Italy – ECHO-BIT project financed by the European Union – Next Generation EU, within the 2022 PRIN call.

The project is joint between the University of Trento – Mario Quaranta – and the University of Torino – Moreno Mancosu.

Brief description

Social and political scientists developed the concept of political echo chamber, defined as a relational or media space in which people are exposed to and communicate (almost) exclusively information congruent with their beliefs.

Citizens can limit their exposure to inconsistent sources of information (from media outlets or individuals/groups). In some cases, they can “isolate” themselves, interacting only with people holding similar opinions, pushing them to being embedded in an echo chamber.

In political terms, an echo chamber is a situation in which partisan citizens tend to be (almost) uniquely exposed to partisan media outlets and discussants. According to theories on echo chambers, being embedded in such environments make people impermeable to opposite views (when they are able to reach them).

This represents a relevant threat to the democratic process. In a well-functioning democracy, being exposed to opposing opinions can allow citizens to have a wider knowledge of political issues to make informed decisions and form their opinions.

Nevertheless, the literature on echo chambers has three major gaps this project aims at filling:

1) The echo chamber hypothesis has been mainly tested in a few contexts, mainly in the US. Therefore, the ECHO-BIT project will extend this test to a country, Italy, that presents specific, understudied political and media-related characteristics.

2) In the literature, different realms of patterns of information acquisition - offline (via interpersonal communication) and online (via social media) - are usually analyzed separately, not comparing the two spheres. The ECHO-BIT project will compare systematically the homogeneity of interpersonal networks and online interactions to investigate how these networks are related to each other.

3) Few works have dealt with the consequences that heterogeneity in online and offline information have for political opinions and behaviors. The ECHO-BIT project will systematically test how different levels of information homogeneity are related to specific opinions (such as generalized and institutional trust, democratic attitudes, affective polarization, and policy preferences) and behaviors (voting, political and social participation).

To achieve these goals, the project will collect a unique dataset in Italy during the 2024 European Elections that consists of:

1) A fine-grained collection of passive metering data (browsing history/social media activity) about citizens’ media and interpersonal political exposure.

2) A longitudinal survey data on the same individuals regarding opinions, behaviors and exposure to homogeneous networks in real life.

The ECHO-BIT project aims at increasing the knowledge on crucial issues of opinion formation and deepening the understanding of the effect of media partisan slant on political attitudes and behaviors.

Team

Trento Unit

Mario Quaranta (PI) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. After earning his PhD in Political Science from the Italian Institute of Human Sciences in Florence in 2013, he conducted research at institutions such as LUISS in Rome, the Scuola Normale Superiore, and the European University Institute, where he was a Max Weber Fellow. His research mainly focuses on political behavior and public opinion. He has mostly published on political participation, voting, citizens’ attitudes towards democracy, political trust, political communication in comparative perspective and in Italy.

Alessandra Malorgio is a research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. She has a Master’s degree in Public and Political Communication at the University of Turin with a thesis titled “Emotional Communication in Electoral Campaigns: A Content Analysis of Giorgia Meloni’s Facebook Posts during the 2022 ‘Campagna Balneare’”. Her key areas of interest include political communication, strategies and techniques employed by leaders and politicians in electoral campaigns to build and maintain relationships with the electorate, the role of emotions and storytelling in politicians’ communication strategies through social networks, text analysis through automated procedures, automated content analysis, and sentiment analysis.

Fabio Torreggiani is a research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento. His research studies how the interplay between individual information processing and social mechanisms shapes public discourse. He has worked on misinformation, social norms, institutional trust, populist beliefs, and agenda-setting. He uses a combination of survey experiments, regression analysis, scraping, and text analysis techniques. Before being part of the ECHO-BIT team, he was a Ph.D. student in Economic Sociology and Labour Studies at NASP, University of Milan, in collaboration with the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, where he studied why people believe in misinformation using social media posts.

Torino Unit

Moreno Mancosu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultures, Politics, and Society of the University of Turin and an Affiliate at the Collegio Carlo Alberto (Italy). His main research interests focus on electoral behavior, political communication, and quantitative methods. He has published in journals such as Political Communication, European Political Science Review, European Journal of Political Research, The International Journal of Press/Politics, and Political Psychology.

Giuliano Bobba is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultures, Politics, and Society of the University of Turin and an Affiliate at the Collegio Carlo Alberto (Italy). His research interests include political communication, populism, and public opinion. He has published in various journals, including The International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism Studies, PLOS ONE, European Political Science, and South European Society & Politics. He is also a co-editor of the journal IPS - Italian Political Science.

Data

The data collection has been concluded in mid July (2024) and the data analysis has just started. The data we collected also include the content of the main TV and radio programs dealing with political issues (as political talk shows, news, etc.). In the following months we will share some preliminary results here.

News

We presented Does the quality of media diets influence individuals’ truth discernment? at the 2024 Conference of the Italian Political Science Association in Trieste, 12-14/9/2024.

The next presentation will be Multimedia political exposure: an integrated analysis of survey and behavioral data at `The CS2 Italy Conference’, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, 15-18/01/2025.

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