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.

KEYWORDS:

• Political parties
• digitalisation
• platforms
• participation
• Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

We can provide the full dataset for replication upon request at any stage of the submission process.

Notes

1 see https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/desi

2 Due to a lack of access to up to date, complete reliable and comparable membership data for all parties included in the sample, we opted for percentage of votes as a proxy as, normally, bigger parties in terms of vote shares also have higher number of members.

3 In alternative models, the article also used % of MPs as measure of party size. The results pointed out that bigger parties (>6% MPs) were more digitalised than smaller ones, but they lost significance when considering three categories.

Additional information

Funding

Marco Meloni acknowledges the Horizon 2020 project ‘The rise of citizens voices for a Greener Europe’ – PHOENIX’ (Grant agreement n. 101037328) for supporting his research activity. Oscar Barberà received the RC21-012 (2022–2024) grant from the Spanish Government and the University of Valencia for a stay at the ESPOL-LAB of the Université Catholique de Lille. His research has also been funded through the CIAICO/2022/164 (2023–2026) grant from the Valencian Regional Government and the UV-INV_AE-2631662 (2023-2024) grant from the University of Valencia.

Notes on contributors

Giulia Sandri

Giulia Sandri is Associate Professor in Political Science at the European School of Political and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Lille and the Director of ESPOL-LAB Research Centre for European and International Politics. Her main research interests are party politics, digital politics and political behavior. Her work has been recently published in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties and French Politics.

Fabio Garcia Lupato

Fabio G. Lupato is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the Department of Political Science and Administration in the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the University Complutense Madrid (Spain). His main research interests focus on political parties, intra-party democracy, digitalisation of politics, and Europeanisation. He has recently published in South European Society & Politics, Policy Studies, Parliamentary Affairs, and Revista Estudios Políticos among others.

Marco Meloni

Marco Meloni is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (UK), Faculty of Social Sciences. He has a Ph.D. in Democracy in the XXI Century by the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra (Portugal). His research interest focuses on Intra-Party Democracy, party digitalisation, Democratic Innovations, digital participation and gamification. He has recently published in South European Society, Policy Studies and Politics and Parliamentary Affairs.

Felix von Nostitz

Felix von Nostitz is Associate Professor in Political Science at the European School of Political and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Lille. His research focuses on elections, voters and party organization in the digital age. His special interests include the analysis of reforms within organizations and the impact on its members. He recently published in Party Politics, Scandinavian Political Studies and French Politics.

Oscar Barberà

Oscar Barberà is associate professor at the Universitat de València (UV) and visiting fellow at the at the European School of Political and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Lille. His main areas of interest are party politics, digital politics, democratic innovations, decentralization and political elites. His main research area of interest is now focused on the consequences of the digital transformation of political parties.