Committed Moderates and Uncommitted Extremists: Ideological Leaning and Parties’ Narratives on Military Interventions in Italy

Current research highlights that ideology decisively affects political contes-tation concerning peace and security operations in European countries. Inparticular, recent studies suggest that party preferences on this issue followa curvilinear distribution along the left-right axis, delineating a conflict be-tween moderate and extreme parties. However, the impact of this cleavageon the use of strategic narratives to either support or criticize these mis-sions requires more attention. This article aims to fill this gap by employ-ing seeded latent Dirichlet allocation, a semi-supervised automated textanalysis method, to analyze parliamentary debates on Italy’s most signifi-cant troop deployments between 1994 and 2013. We expect to find thatwhile moderates express a supportive narrative aimed at justifying the useof force, extremists attempt to delegitimize military interventions. Accord-ingly, we hypothesize that moderate parties emphasize more on the multi-lateral and humanitarian framework of a mission, while extremist partiesfocus more on its military means. The empirical findings largely confirmour hypotheses. By means of its method and results, the article contributesboth empirically and methodologically to the debate on the party politicsof military interventions in Europe.