While a number of studies discuss the nature of electoral strategies, the relative effectiveness of these approaches has rarely been tested. Only recently scholars attempted to analyze the effect of electoral campaigns focusing mainly on traditional media. Monitoring the electoral campaign for the Italian 2013 elections, we estimate the impact of electoral strategies, such as clientelism, populism, and negative campaigning. This paper takes advantage of an innovative technique of text analysis that allows estimating the political preferences of the public opinion by means of semi-automated sentiment analysis. By doing so, we will analyze the preferences expressed on Twitter, which is a social media that directly connects politicians and voters. Linking the declarations released on Twitter by the seven main Italian parties, and their leaders, to the shifts in Twitter users’ voting intention registered day-by-day during the electoral campaign, we will assess the relative effectiveness of each strategy and whether different parties benefit from specific strategies differently. The results of the statistical analysis will reveal whether negative campaign, clientelistic or populist statements, released on social network sites, produce the intended effect on voting intention.
