Through the study of a wide range of political parties from Europe and beyond, our upcoming book (“Digital Parties – The Challenges of Online Organisation and Participation”, New York, Springer, Forthcoming 2021, edited with Oscar Barbera, Patricia Correa and Juan Teruel) explores the different degrees of digitalisation of contemporary political parties. We also explore the main technological and democratic issues and trade-offs that political parties have faced in their digital transition.
The most relevant finding is that all political parties operating in the democracies analysed have digitalised their organisations to some extent. Our empirical cross-country analyses shows that the digitalisation of parties does not entail a homogenous process of convergence towards a new mode of managing party organisations. Instead, the spread of digitalisation is producing substantial differences among forces in both the degree and the pattern of implementation of ICTs in intra-party functioning. Hence, it is particularly important now to further explore how the large, mainstream, traditional parties are dealing with ICTs and how they adapt to this digital transformation. Furthermore, our next steps in comparative digitisation research will focus on identifying general patterns of digitalisation, going beyond those parties more specifically committed to the new ICT tools.
The paper was presented at a roundtable on Digitalization of Political Parties: International Experiences, organized by the Masaryk Democratic Academy and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's Regional Office in Prague for the Czech Republic on Monday, June 14, 2021.
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