Linguistic gendered biases in the representations of populist and nonpopulist Italian leaders. Naming strategies and psycholinguistic markers on the Facebook comments of their followers

Studies on journalistic communication highlighted systematic gendered biases when naming women politicians compared to their men colleagues. These biases manifested in fewer references to women’s political offices, often opting for their first name or both first name and surname. Conversely, for men, there was a preference for using solely their surname. Experimental research has shown the negative consequences of these biases for women. With our study, we have shifted the attention to common-sense conveyed by Facebook. Between September 2019 and February 2021, we analyzed 43,796 comments from followers of two pairs of Italian politicians (one right-wing populist, the other center-left nonpopu- list) during the Italian Conte II cabinet. VOSPEC method of the textual statistical software SPAD-T allowed the identification of the most significant lemmas for the followers of each leader. The outputs also enabled a qualitative study of the discursive context of these lemmas. We discussed the results fo- cusing on persistent androcentrism in politics.