This cutting-edge book explores the diverse and contested meanings of ''citizenship'' in the 21st century, as representative democracy faces a mounting crisis in the wake of the Digital Age. Luigi Ceccarini enriches and updates the common notion of citizenship, answering the question of how it is possible to fully live as a citizen in a post-modern political community. Employing an international, multidisciplinary framework, Ceccarini brings together the findings of continental political philosophy and history, and contemporary western political science and communication studies to advance our understanding of political motivation and participation in the present day. As new participatory and monitoring dynamics of online citizenship redefine the very form of public space, this timely book addresses the values, creativity and aspirations through which social actors engage with a networked society, making use of technological innovations and new forms of communication to participate in post-representative politics. A provocative call to action in an era defined by distrust, disillusionment and digitization, this book is crucial reading for scholars and researchers of political science, sociology and communication studies, particularly those seeking a thoroughly modern understanding of digital citizenship. It will also benefit advanced political science students in need of a historical overview of the concept of citizenship and how it has developed under the auspices of the Internet.

Italian politics has changed course yet again. Thanks to the outcome of the 2022 general election, a coalition dominated, for the first time, by a party of the far right has taken office under Giorgia Meloni, the first woman to serve as prime minister in Italy’s republican history. Italy has always been a kind of ‘political laboratory’ for Western democracies – one in which new political phenomena have developed with considerable potency. Consequently, the electoral analyses presented in this book make it possible for the reader to understand the challenges and related consequences that established democracies are currently facing, beyond Italy.

This volume employs a comparative approach to cast light on representation and representative processes from a communications perspective. It focuses on online constituency communication, aiming to provide a perspective from which to empirically study the changes taking place in the relationship between citizens and their representatives. The (hyper)mediatisation of politics and society is here considered a relevant enabling factor, because it creates the conditions leading to change in the nature of democratic processes. The chapters discuss Podemos, the Lega, Law and Justice, and the Five-star Movement as good examples of this phenomenon. Populist and nationalist forces have emerged as bottom-up and top-down entities aiming to embody the will of the people, or to push for democratic processes to be more inclusive. Until now, however, the intersection between populist and nationalist discourses and the related question of representation have been largely ignored. By analysing the transformations that have taken place in MPs’ communication practices in non-election periods, the contributors illuminate how social media is affecting MPs’ communication and examine the strains in the relationship between executives and legislatures that populist and nationalist parties exploit.

This volume employs a comparative approach to cast light on representation and representative processes from a communications perspective. It focuses on online constituency communication, aiming to provide a perspective from which to empirically study the changes taking place in the relationship between citizens and their representatives. The (hyper)mediatisation of politics and society is here considered a relevant enabling factor, because it creates the conditions leading to change in the nature of democratic processes. The chapters discuss Podemos, the Lega, Law and Justice, and the Five-star Movement as good examples of this phenomenon. Populist and nationalist forces have emerged as bottom-up and top-down entities aiming to embody the will of the people, or to push for democratic processes to be more inclusive. Until now, however, the intersection between populist and nationalist discourses and the related question of representation have been largely ignored. By analysing the transformations that have taken place in MPs' communication practices in non-election periods, the contributors illuminate how social media is affecting MPs' communication and examine the strains in the relationship between executives and legislatures that populist and nationalist parties exploit.

This book provides a lively and comprehensive account of the unprecedented Italian general election of 2018 and of its profound significance for Italy and beyond. The contributions in this volume cover the political, economic and international contexts in which the vote took place, and consider the main election contenders in the run-up to the election as well as the campaigns. The book further examines the election outcome, analysing the votes and discussing the impact of the election on the turnover of parliamentary personnel as well as examining the outcome from the viewpoint of government formation.