The article, published at Information, Communication and Society (ICS) has been co-authored by Giulia Sandri (ESPOL), Fabio García Lupato (UCM), Marco Meloni (US), Felix von Nostitz (ESPOL) and Oscar Barberà (UV & ESPOL)

An increasing number of studies explore the impact of digital technologies on political parties, but a 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 aim is to measure variations in the patterns of digitalisation of intra-party activities, and to preliminary explore the relevance of some systemic, party system and intra-organizational factors in shaping the use of party digital innovations (Garcia Lupato and Meloni 2023, Raniolo, Vittori and Tarditi 2021). 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.

Reference

Sandri, G., Lupato, F. G., Meloni, M., von Nostitz, F., & Barberà, O. (2024). Mapping the digitalisation of European political parties. Information, Communication & Society, doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2343369

Link to the publication at ICS