Mapping the digitalisation of European political parties

Abstract

An increasing number of comparative case studies explore the drivers and impacts of digital technologies on political parties (Bennet et al., 2018. The democratic interface: Technology, political organization, and diverging patterns of electoral representation. Information Communication & Society, 21(11), 1655–1680; Gerbaudo, 2019. The digital party: Political organisation and online democracy. Pluto Press), but a large comparative account on how parties are changing due to digitalisation is still lacking. Based on the new Digitalisation in Parties (DIGIPART) Dataset developed by the authors, this paper addresses this gap by empirically assessing the use of digital platforms and their affordances in 62 parties in five European countries (France, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom and Spain). Building on previous research by Fitzpatrick (2021. The five-pillar model of parties’ migration into the digital. In O. Barberà, G. Sandri, P. Correa, & J. Rodríguez-Teruel (Eds.), Digital parties: The challenges of online organisation and participation (pp. 23–42). Springer Nature), the aim is to measure variations in the patterns of digitalisation of party activities, and to preliminary explore the relevance of some systemic and intra-organizational factors in shaping the use of party digital innovations (Lupato & Meloni, 2023. Digital intra-party democracy: An exploratory analysis of Podemos and the Labour Party. Parliamentary Affairs, 76(1), 22–42; Raniolo, Vittori and Tarditi 2021. Political parties and new digital technologies: Between tradition and innovation. In O. Barberà, G. Sandri, P. Correa, & J. Rodríguez-Teruel (Eds.), Digital parties: The challenges of online organisation and participation (pp. 181–204). Springer Nature). The preliminary results show that digital solutions are starting to be adopted as a facilitator of internal participation and that larger and older parties seem to be more digitalised than newer and smaller ones.