The impact of digital technology on politics has been profound. In just a few decades, the institutions, procedures and practices of democratic politics have been radically transformed. The way in which organizations and individuals are adapting to digital, and the consequences of these shifts for politics, are the subject of a growing sub-discipline devoted to the study of technology and politics. Yet, to date, surprisingly limited attention has been paid to the consequences of digital technology for party politics. Whilst a flurry of initial commentary was offered by Helen Margetts' notion of the 'cyber party' (2006), and scholars such as Gibson et al. (2004), Greffet (2013) and Kefford (2019) have traced the organizational implications of digital technology for parties, analysis so far has tended to focus on the consequences of digital for established parties. Studies have therefore looked at parties' adoption of websites and social media, the growth of digital campaigning techniques, and the implications of digital for membership. Largely absent within this literature has been the analysis of new parties that are entirely reliant upon digital for their operation. Paulo Gerbaudo's The Digital Party adopts such a focus, and therefore marks an important new contribution to this field. Offering an outline of what he deems to be 'the new organisational template' (2019: 4) of digital parties, he uses comparative international analysis to explore, in detail, the emergence of parties imbued with digital techniques and tools. Apparent in the form of the Pirate Party, Podemos, the Five Star Movement, and evident to a lesser event in France Insoumise and Momentum, Gerbaudo diagnoses a new form of digital organization that differs substantively from the 'mass party', 'catch-all' or 'cartel' parties of the past. Gerbaudo's digital parties exist primarily online, using websites and online discussion forums to organize. Unlike established parties, they have been designed to capitalize on the benefits that digital provides. Whilst so far few in number, the examples surveyed in the book show the potential for digital parties to transform party competition, with new parties emerging and rapidly achieving electoral success. In grasping precisely what it is that distinguishes these new digital parties from established parties that are adopting digital tools, Gerbaudo offers a multi-faceted conception. Specifying numerous traits, he contends that digital parties are those that: • '[P]romise to deliver a new politics supported by digital technology' that is 'more open to ordinary people, more immediate and direct, more authentic and transparent' (Ibid.: 4)
Facing the ubiquitous and asynchronous nature of digital communication and interaction, parties face the challenge to migrate to some extent into the digital (Fitzpatrick 2018). This is not the case for election campaigns, but for the time in-between elections due to reasons for raising funds and other resources. These processes often rely on the digital sphere. Parties are not only challenged by relocating their communication strategies in normal times into new vessels, but also to encounter increased interactional demands by their target groups - members and supporters (Scarrow 2015). This comes along with the well-researched decline of established parties due to different societal causes (van Biezen, Poguntke 2014; Whiteley 2011, Montigny 2015). Parties’ adaptation of information and communication technologies (ICT) poses another challenge: How to migrate into the digital without losing those who are already engaged offline? How can parties manage to get the best out of both worlds – online and offline – and meet the demands of their adherents? These questions are connected to the research of intra-party democracy (e.g. Close et al. 2017; Faucher and Boy 2018; Bernardi et al. 2017) and leadership (Poguntke and Webb 2005; Musella 2018) as well as to research on parties’ virtual presence (e.g. Römmele 2003).We seek to understand how parties operate online in terms of building relationships between the organization and its members as well as fostering relationships between individual adherents. To grasp what is going on, we analyze parties’ websites and Facebook fan pages. We follow a comparative approach by conducting a pair-comparison. Our cases are the British Conservative Party and the German Christian Democratic Union with a panel data set from 2013 to 2018. Both parties hold governmental responsibility and face national turmoil within their countries. We analyze websites because we assume them serving as a hub of information and exchange for members and supporters. This allows us to investigate how both channels of ICTs are used either to disseminate information or to establish dialogue and discourse on platform media.
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