COVID-19 and party competition over the EU: Italy in Early Pandemic Times

Despite receiving much attention in the literature, existing analyses on the impact of Covid-19 on European societies and politics do not investigate the consequences for party competition over the European Union (EU) dimension. To this end, this article asks whether the pandemic affected the salience of the EU issue and the related party positions in Italy during the ‘first wave’ of the crisis. The analysis relies on an original CrowdTangle dataset comprising around 24000 posts from parties’ official Facebook pages, which are thematically coded and subsequently employed in time-series cross-section regression models. The findings show that the pandemic caused a significant increase in salience and polarisation of the EU issue in the Italian party system.