The Effect of Elite and Political Values on Political Support for Putin’s Russia among Greeks and Italians: the Study of Social Networks

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the elite and of political values on the high levels of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia among Greeks and Italians. The two assumptions being investigated as sources for political support, the elite effect and political values, were drawn from the literature. Greece and Italy were selected for the analysis due to the fact that both countries have several parties with pro-Russia view and large shares of their populations hold a positive view of Russia and its president. This renders them unique cases in the EU. Due to the popularity of the internet, social medias were selected as socializing agent and the investigation was carried out on Facebook the most popular social network in Greece and Italy. Both for the elite effect and for political values a selection of relevant keywords was created in order to select the relevant content. The time frame of the analysis is 2014-2019, 2014 being important due to the events in Ukraine, therefore only posts within such time frame were considered. To assess the elite effect a content analysis was performed on the Facebook pages of Greek politician Alexis Tripas and its party SYRIZA, and on the pages of Italian politicians Matteo Salvini and Luigi di Maio and their parties Lega Nord and Movimento 5 Stelle. For the political values content analyses on Greek and Italian pro-Russia Facebook pages were done. The findings of this paper are that the assumption that elite effect plays a role in shaping people’s view on Putin’s Russia holds true for the Italian leaders and their parties, as the pages contain several anti-EU and pro-Russia posts, whereas it is weak for the Greek one as Tsipra’s pages have little mention of Russia. The assumption of political values holds true both for Greeks and Italians. The users from these countries share anti-Western views which match Putin Russia’s foreign policy and interests. These users socialize on pro-Russia pages, and by doing so they share and reinforce their political values.