The power of the President: a quantitative narrative analysis of the Diary of an Italian head of state (2006–2013)

Many authors agree that the President of the Italian Republic is the head of state with the widest powers among parliamentary governments in Europe. Although several studies have sought to explain Why the President’s power may increase or decrease, a quantitative measurement of the phenomenon—able to answer questions also about the Who (the actors), How (the modalities) and How much (the consistency) of the phenomenon itself—has seldom been carried out by scholars. This paper seeks to answer these unanswered substantive questions by measuring the potential power of the Italian head of state in a crucial case—the first Presidency of Giorgio Napolitano (2006–2013)—by means of a quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) and a social network analysis of his Diary. This is done in a semi-automated way by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including regular expressions and named-entity recognition. As regards the methodological contribution of the paper, its aim is to demonstrate that QNA with NLP tools for semi-automated analysis of textual data can be considered an effective and reliable methodology for the empirical investigation of potential power, enabling a more widespread application of this technique in the quantitative analysis of topics related to the power approach—that some scholars consider otherwise obsolete—also at the comparative level.