Threat to Face and equivocation in televised interviews in Italy’s politicians for and against the 2016 Constitutional Referendum

On December 4, 2016, a constitutional referendum took place in Italy, aiming at completely changing the structure of governmental institutions. During the electoral campaign, televised interviews of political leaders played an important role guaranteeing the dissemination of information to citizens. The present study analyzed a sample of these interviews. Four reliable observers coded 32 h of interviews from nine broadcasts by four different national channels to identify types of coercive questions, face-threatening (or conflict) questions, and equivocal answers. These included 79 politicians from 18 political parties. Results showed that: (a) many aspects characterized the interviews that took place during different party campaigns; (b) channels and the majority of interviewers did not discriminate between politicians who favored and opposed the referendum, remaining almost neutral; and (c) no evidence was found indicating that answer equivocations arose from face-threatening questions. Therefore, particular use of questions and answers, absence of partisan bias, and disavowal of the main prediction of Equivocation Theory, marked this electoral campaign as unique. These results are illustrated by excerpts from our corpus of data.