Is “manovra” Really “del popolo”? Linguistic Insights into Twitter Reactions to the Annual Italian Budget Law

Relying on linguistic cues obtained by means of structural topic modeling as well as descriptive lexical analyses, this study contributes to the general understanding of the Twitter users’ response to the annual Italian budget law approved at the end of December 2018. Some topics contained in the dataset of tweets are procedural or generic, but besides those, it often emerges that Twitter users expressed their concern with respect to the provisions of this law. Supportive attitudes seem to be less frequent. This paper also advocates that findings from inductive studies on Twitter data should be interpreted with caution, since the nature of tweets might not be adequate for drawing far-reaching generalizations.