Anatomy of a government crisis. Political institutions, security, and consensus

We present an application of the Emotional Text Mining (ETM) in the field of political science. The research aims to identify the symbolic categories that have set the communications of Twitter users on the subject of the government crisis that occurred in Italy in August 2019. The ETM allowed identifying the causes of the fluctuations in the consensus expressed to the actors involved in the affair. The main conclusion of the study is that the political representation and the needs of citizens, that struggle to encounter at a local level, find in the Web a new meeting space, where consensus emerges and vanishes with striking evidence.