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

Henceforth we will use the singular masculine pronoun he to refer to the PoR (instead of the form s/he, previously used throughout the text referring to the Italian Constitution) because in Italy, since 1948 to the present time, there have been no women elected as PoR.

Important references to this approach, among political scientists, are the works of Duverger (1980) and Elgie (1996), although they refer to the French case, and therefore to the semi-presidential system of government.

Available online at: http://​presidenti.​quirinale.​it/​elementi/​Elenchi.​aspx?​tipo=​Visita.

Available online with a free license at: www.​pc-ace.​com.

Not in all democratic states do presidential diaries—be they of heads of state, heads of government, or both—exist at the same level of detail and/or are available for public consultation. E.g., in the United States of America, where the research on the presidential agenda is for various reasons the state of art of this kind of empirical analysis (Edwards and Wayne 1990; Link and Kegley 1993), the presidents’ diaries are available online at the website of the White House Historical Association: available at https://​www.​whitehousehistor​y.​org/​the-presidents-daily-diary. The level of detail of the diaries varies from president to president. In some cases, e.g. the presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, those registers list minute by minute all contacts had by each president with other persons, including telephone appointments, in addition to face to face ones. In other cases, like the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson presidencies, the level of detail and the diaries’ completeness is lesser or is not extended to all years of their presidential term of office. For example, this is the case of President George H.W. Bush, for whom only the two-year period 1989–1990 is available. Lastly, the diaries of the presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Trump were still not available online at the time of the website consultation, while in regard to president Clinton only daily summaries including what the president intended to do and not only what he really did were available at the time of our visit.

Napolitano is the first to have been elected twice as the Italian PoR (in 2006 and 2013). He was elected for the first time on 10 May 2006, with a majority of 543 votes out of 1009 election assembly members. He obtained the votes of the representatives of centre-left parties, which at the time had entered into the Unione (Tebaldi 2014b, p. 562). He has been senator for life since 2005, and he was previously an elected member of the parliament (1953–1996), president of the Chamber of Deputies (1992–1994), Minister of the Interior (1996–1998), and member of the European Parliament (1999–2004).

Scraping is a process used to extract information from web pages. We developed an ad-hoc script for this task. In particular, we used the wget tool to download the data from the Web at specified URLs.

NLP is a research sector of computer science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics dealing with human–machine interactions and, in particular, the processing of natural language data.

In relation to the project’s significance on the basis of the semantic triplets obtained see Franzosi (2010, pp. 139–140).

E.g., if the actor was part of a majority or minority group in the Italian parliament, which was obtainable only through consultation of information exogenous with respect to that contained in the Diary.

The reader is advised that, because in our coding scheme the What consists in the action of each presidential meeting, it is considered to be an implicit constant of the research (it is simply always meet). Hence, for this reason, the What will be skipped in what follows of our description.

During Napolitano’s first term of office, three governments followed each other. The Prodi government remained in office 734 days, from 6 May 2006 to 8 May 2008. The Berlusconi IV government was in office 1288 days from 8 May 2008 to 16 November 2011. The Monti government remained in office 530 days, from 16 November 2011 to 28 April 2013.

In the case of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, in addition to the post of minister, deputy minister and undersecretary, also the post of secretary general was considered.