The Discursive Dimensions of Pernicious Polarization. Analysis of Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe on Twitter

The objective of this research is to explore the political discourse of West European right-wing populist leaders in the perspective of pernicious polarization, focusing on their positions and argumentation styles. To achieve this, over 50,000 tweets from right-wing populist leaders in Western Europe (Italy, France and Spain) were collected for a period spanning from 2 July 2019, which marks the beginning of the 9th legislature of the European Parliament, to 2 July 2023. Employing Text Mining and Topic Modeling techniques, this research will reconstruct and comparatively analyze the topics addressed by the leaders from different countries and the dynamics of polarization discourse proposing an exploratory study aiming to locate the words of pernicious polarization used by each leader.