From the periphery to the agenda. Intermedia dynamics in the 2025 Italian citizenship referendum

The 2025 Italian citizenship referendum represents a critical case for examining how peripheral political issues attempt to gain visibility and enter the public agenda within a contemporary hybrid media environment. Referendums constitute moments of intensified political communication in which a heterogeneous group of actors - political elites, social movements, NGOs, and civil society organizations - competes to define issue salience, frames, and meanings (Wirth et al., 2010). Unlike electoral campaigns centered on individual political leaders, referendum campaigns mobilize unstable coalitions of support and opposition, often characterized by pronounced asymmetries in communicative resources and media access. This paper uses the 2025 Italian citizenship referendum as a critical case to test the limits of intermedia agenda-setting processes for peripheral political issues under conditions of elite-led demobilization. The analysis focuses on the fifth referendum question, which proposed the partial repeal of Law 91/1992 regulating the length of residence required to obtain Italian citizenship. Despite decades of mobilization by migrant-led movements, advocacy claims-making - such as the L’Italia sono anch’io campaign (2011) - citizenship reform has historically occupied a marginal position in Italian public debate. In this sense, the 2025 referendum marked an unprecedented moment of public visibility for an issue long confined to the political periphery and has been described as a paradigmatic case of counter-politics (Gargiulo & Tailmoun, 2024). The study is situated within the broader transformation of political communication characterized by multimodal news consumption. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report (2025), in the Italian context, television - especially RAI public service broadcasting - continues to play a central role in agenda consolidation. However, since 2023 the Internet has become the primary source of news consumption, with a substantial share of online news accessed via social media platforms (AGCOM, 2025). From an agenda-building perspective, referendums highlight the processes through which actors attempt to move issues across different levels of the agenda, from public attention to formal decision-making arenas (Cobb & Elder, 1971; Cobb et al., 1976). These dynamics are especially salient for peripheral issues, whose visibility depends less on routine political coverage and more on episodic mobilization, strategic communication, and media amplification. Agenda-building in such contexts reflects structural inequalities in communicative power and media access. In this sense, the concept of intermedia agenda-setting (Harder et al., 2017) provides a suitable framework for analyzing how different media arenas- television news, newspapers, and social media platforms - mutually influence issue salience over time. The 2025 Italian citizenship referendum revealed a context of explicit elite demobilization. Several political figures, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, framed abstention as a legitimate and strategic choice, making explicit the low priority of the issue within the governmental and political agenda. During the referendum, the promoters struggled to mobilize voters, and ultimately failed to reach the required quorum, whereas mainstream media attention remained limited, accounting for approximately 1–2% of news coverage (AGCOM, 2025; Osservatorio di Pavia, 2025). Empirically, the paper combines four original datasets to analyze agenda-building and intermedia dynamics across different media. First, it includes daily monitoring of four national television bulletins capturing agenda consolidation processes within legacy media. Second, it analyzes a corpus of major Italian newspapers, collecting 680 full-text articles related to the citizenship referendum campaign. Third, it examines weekly samples of the 100 most-engaged posts on X and Bluesky, collected through three issue-related queries. Fourth, it analyzes Instagram content published by the main promoters of the citizenship referendum campaign, focusing on communication strategies of bottom-up agenda pressure. The study addresses three research questions: (1) How did the salience of referendum-related themes evolve over time across different media? (2) Which actors emerged as most visible, and what roles did they play in shaping the agenda around citizenship reform? (3) What patterns of intermedia agenda setting can be observed during the campaign? The findings show that the public debate followed a similar temporal trajectory across legacy and social media. The referendum entered the media agenda only one month before the vote and disappeared almost immediately afterward, suggesting a strong dependence on electoral timing. Despite persistent online mobilization, the capacity of activists and grassroots actors to influence legacy media agendas remained minimal, underscoring the persistent gatekeeping role of legacy media. Furthermore, political elites dominated both traditional and digital agendas, reflecting the mediatization of politics and the highly politicized nature of the campaign. At the same time, the analysis confirms the crucial role of social media - especially Instagram - in sustaining the visibility of a marginal political issue. The mobilization that enabled the creation of the fifth referendum question, the publicization of the signature collection process, would not have been possible without the intensive use of the promoters’ Instagram accounts. However, this digital visibility did not translate into sustained intermedia agenda transfer toward legacy media. Overall, the case highlights the structural difficulties faced by advocacy claims making groups to drive peripheral issues into the public agenda. By empirically testing the limits of intermedia agenda-setting processes in a peripheral, high-conflict issue area characterized by elite-led demobilization, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on political communication, digital activism, and the capacity of infosphere to foster more inclusive public debate.