Engaging With Fandom and Politics: The Case of Giuseppe Conte’s Fans on Instagram

The article focuses on the phenomenon of political fandom and its potential impact on citizens’ political engagement. In particular, our research intends to offer a contribution to the discussion of possible types of online fan-like attachment to a political leader. Our case study is the Instagram account @lebimbedigiuseppeconte, a fanpage celebrating the former Italian Prime minister Giuseppe Conte. We analyzed posts between 2018 and 2022 with the aim of investigating the evolution of the account following the change of Conte’s role from the office of Prime Minister—that he held as an outsider—to the more politicized role of leader of the Five-Star Movement. Our results suggest that, although in the first phase @lebimbedigiuseppeconte could not be regarded as a standard type of political fandom, its evolution shows that also a fanpage born with no apparent political goal and a vocation for entertaining may become a platform for the diffusion of political contents.