The power of the President: a quantitative narrative analysis of the Diary of an Italian head of state (2006–2013)

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 (2006Napolitano ( -2013-by means of a quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) and a social network analysis of his Diary. This is done in a semiautomated 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.

The actorness of the President of the Republic in Italian foreign policy: a quantitative narrative analysis of two case studies (1999–2013)

“…7 and 8, normalised by government, also allow us to assess the intensity of Ciampi's and Napolitano's year-by-year relationships under different analytical categories in which we break down the foreign policy domain. From this perspective, compared with previous research findings on the relational capacity of the Head of State in domestic politics (Tebaldi et al 2018(Tebaldi et al , 2019, both presidents do not seem-willing or able-to modulate their accordion action during their 7-year term. In fact, the empirical evidence shows that both presidents do not adopt different strategies from year to year but adopt a similar relational behaviour that is consistent with that of any government during their mandate.…”

“…The above-mentioned methodological assumption stipulates that the number, the frequency, and the intensity of the PoRs relationships are reliable indicators of the relevance of the PoR's role in the domain where they occur. Indeed, the contribution of the present paper compared to the previously published works (Tebaldi et al 2018(Tebaldi et al , 2019 is to evaluate for the first time, through a comparative analysis of the interactions of two different PoRs, the relevance of the role of the PoR within the foreign policy domain (i.e., the actorness of the PoR in Italian foreign policy), also in comparison with other relevant policy areas (i.e., domestic policy), in which the PoR's relational activity develops.…”

“…Therefore, we can state that the foreign policy domain is the predominant relational policy field of the two Italian PoR subjects of this study. However, since our methodological assumption stipulates that the PoR relationships are reliable indicators of the relevance of his role in the policy field where they occur, and other analyses have demonstrated the PoR's relevant role in the Italian political system based on the number of relations that he maintains with other politicalinstitutional actors (Tebaldi et al 2018(Tebaldi et al , 2019, following this argument, it can be correctly stated that his role is similarly relevant in the foreign policy field, where he maintains his most frequent and intense relations.…”

“…The methodological assumption that connects the two stages of our research has been empirically validated in previous works on the topic (Tebaldi et al 2018(Tebaldi et al , 2019, which however exclusively concerned the role of the Italian PoR in the domestic politics and also not in a comparative venue. The above-mentioned methodological assumption stipulates that the number, the frequency, and the intensity of the PoRs relationships are reliable indicators of the relevance of the PoR's role in the domain where they occur.…”

“…Instead, the accordion trend returns to characterise the relational interests of the presidents if we look at the bar charts, normalised by government, in Figs. 9 and 10, showing the relations between Ciampi and Napolitano and those that are considered the four ministries that form the state's political-administrative backbone, for both foreign and domestic policy (Tebaldi et al 2018(Tebaldi et al , 2019): on the one hand, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation; on the other hand, the Ministries of Economy and Finance, Interior and Justice. With more details, as far as Ciampi is concerned, the intensity of his meetings with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation during the Berlusconi II government particularly stands out (45 meetings in 1412 days of government) compared with 33 meetings with the Ministry of Economy and Finance, 16 with the Ministry of the Interior and 11 with the Ministry of Justice.…”