Coercive and Face‐Threatening Questions to Left‐Wing and Right‐Wing Politicians During Two Italian Broadcasts: Conversational Indexes of Par Conditio for Democracy Systems1

Indexes of political interviewers' neutrality, proposed in the face model, capture the treatment reserved in televised interviews for politicians or parties. This contribution proposes that they should be introduced in the official survey of political appearances on television and be prescribed by law. The research compares questions of 2 Italian interviewers to the same 13 politicians (7 left‐wing, 6 right‐wing). In over 11 hr of interviews (7 months' sampling), 804 questions were codified. Italian interviewers were less threatening than their Anglo Saxon colleagues, even if just as coercive. They treated the government less coercively than the opposition, even if they were just as threatening; and they seemed sensitive to the prestige of politicians. Implications of the proposal are discussed.