"How are you?" Listening as Political Communication: Affective Infrastructure, Trust, and Democratic Renewal in Italy's Centre-Left"

In an era of post-political trends and the rise of prominent leaders, the notion that engaging with a party's supporters could stimulate political participation, particularly in marginalised urban areas and social peripheries, might appear unconventional. However, the research project commissioned by the Italian Democratic Party and conducted by our research unit focused precisely on this combination. This paper presents the findings of a two-tier research project conducted as part of a nationwide, grassroots listening campaign carried out between February and June 2026. Situated within critical political communication scholarship, the study posits that listening can be considered a form of communication infrastructure with the potential to reshape relationships between political parties and their social constituencies particularly in contexts of declining institutional trust (Rosanvallon, 2008; Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2016). This occurs despite challenges such as affective polarisation (Iyengar & Krupenkin, 2018), deep mediatisation (Hepp, 2020), and participatory exhaustion. The research design articulates a dual-layered empirical architecture that foregrounds the dialectical relationship between grassroots political subjectivities and institutional communication strategies. Conceptually grounded in critical theories of communication, media, democracy studies, and mediated political participation, this framework interrogates listening as a contested field where power relations, affective economies, and democratic legitimacy are negotiated and reproduced, rather than merely as a tactical instrument. The first analytical strand examines the listening phase oriented towards party members, supporters and peripheral publics situated at the margins of formal political participation. Methodologically, this investigation uses a triangulated approach, combining qualitative depth with mixed-method breadth. Face-to-face encounters, semi-structured interviews and survey instruments generate a multidimensional empirical corpus capable of capturing both individual narratives and collective patterns of political engagement and disengagement. This strand interrogates four interconnected communicative dimensions that, together, illuminate the texture of contemporary democratic disaffection: 1) affective politics and everyday vulnerability. The research foregrounds the affective dimensions of political subjectivity by posing the seemingly simple question, 'How are you?'. This methodological entry point enables the analysis of how personal anxieties, experiences of precarity and structures of vulnerability are articulated, mediated and potentially politicised within everyday discourse. The investigation reveals how neoliberal individualisation processes fragment collective experience while simultaneously creating latent grounds for solidarity through shared precarity. 2) Future-Oriented Imaginaries and the Politics of Hope. Beyond immediate concerns, the research explores participants' future-oriented imaginaries by examining articulated hopes and the conditions that might restore collective political possibility. Aspirations relating to social justice, ecological transition, workplace dignity and intergenerational equity are analysed as communicatively constructed horizons that illuminate the material and symbolic conditions through which hope acquires political traction, rather than as abstract ideals. 3) Relational positionality towards institutional politics. The third analytical focus examines how participants articulate their relationship with politics in general, political parties as organisational forms, the centre-left political formation and the Democratic Party specifically. Attention is paid to the communicative strategies through which political distance, disillusionment or tentative affiliation are expressed. 4) Media ecologies. Media ecologies and communicative infrastructures are examined. Underpinning these dimensions is an examination of the mediated nature of political listening itself. The second empirical strand shifts the analytical focus from the subjectivities of citizens to the listening campaign itself, examining it as a political communication strategy embedded within institutional power relations. Through qualitative content analysis of campaign materials, discourse analysis of official messaging, organisational ethnography and in-depth interviews with PD leaders and campaign coordinators, this phase will investigate how listening is strategically framed, operationally implemented and institutionalised within party communication structures. This strand foregrounds several critical tensions: A) The dialectic of openness and control. The research examines the structural contradictions between bottom-up democratic openness and top down strategic management. How are grassroots contributions filtered, translated, and incorporated into programmatic priorities? What selection, interpretive, and codification mechanisms determine which voices are amplified and which remain inaudible? These questions shed light on the power dynamics that govern the transformation of participatory input into political narratives and policy positions. B) Institutional translation and domestication. The analysis focuses on the processes through which diverse citizen expressions are translated into coherent party discourse. This 'communicative labour' of institutional appropriation reveals how listening campaigns risk reproducing the very hierarchies they ostensibly challenge, transforming genuine dialogue into extractive data collection and authentic participation into managed consultation. C) Negotiating party power structures. Finally, the research investigates how listening is negotiated within existing intra party power configurations. This dimension foregrounds listening not as a neutral democratic practice, but as an area of contention where competing visions of party identity and political strategy clash. By combining audience-centred research with an analysis of party-level communicative practices, the paper advances a relational understanding of listening as a form of political communication. The main hypothesis is that listening-based strategies can potentially disrupt top-down agenda-setting logics, thereby fostering the co-production of political meaning and policy legitimacy. However, it also highlights the structural and organisational constraints that shape the transformative capacity of listening within contemporary party politics. By framing listening as core infrastructure for rebuilding trust and re-embedding political parties within the lived experiences of their constituencies, particularly in contemporary democratic peripheries, the paper contributes to debates on participation, representation, and democratic renewal.