Platform politics: Party organisation in the digital age

Abstract

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“Not To Be Taken Personally”: Tracing Six Decades of Scholarship on Personal, Personalist, and Personalized Political Parties (1960–2021)

“…In other words, when a politician behaves as a party’s owner, the party itself is not necessarily personalized . Complementarily, Calise (2015) used the intersection of high/low media exposure and internal power to characterize existing personal parties, as “talk show parties,” “notables parties,” “prime minister parties” plus Internet-based “platform politics” (Lioy et al, 2019). Finally, Coppedge (1997) used outwards appearance to conceptualize personal parties as either “[p]arties that base their primary appeal on the charisma, authority, or efficacy of their leader rather than on any principles or platforms” or “unusually heterogeneous electoral fronts” supporting a leader.…”

“…Obviously, over time all political parties-personal or otherwise-evolve to some degree, with a notorious literature providing the conceptualizations leading from cadre, to mass, to catch-all, to cartel, to franchise, and finally cyber parties and platform politics (Carty, 2004;Duverger, 1951;Katz and Mair, 1995;Kirchheimer, 1966;Lioy et al, 2019;Margetts, 2001;Nunziata, 2021). Yet, many narrow characterizations of personal parties treat them as if they had to remain under-institutionalized, which is just empirically false.…”

Digitalization in Candidate Selection. Support and Resistance Within Established Political Parties in Germany

“…Some evidence was indeed found of digitalization rekindling interest for political parties. Digitalization has for example been shown to lead to more involvement of party members and supporters, with greater member satisfaction (Lioy et al, 2019;Deseriis, 2020), some authors are going as far as to say it might hold the keys to "party renewal" (Chadwick and Stromer-Galley, 2016), or that it answers to "the need to radically update the organizational forms of politics and adapt them to the digital era" (Gerbaudo, 2019, p. 190). However, not all the evidence supports this positive evaluation (Kernell, 2015;Trittin-Ulbrich et al, 2021), as critics argue that the hyper-centralization of party processes in some countries did not disappear with digitalization (Blasio and Viviani, 2020;Cepernich and Fubini, 2020), or that very low participation rates will lead to parties' attempts at deepening democratization to feel like "empty vessels" (Vittori, 2020).…”

“…Indeed, existing studies suggest that political parties and their MPs somewhat adapted to the general trend of digitalization (Zittel, 2015;Lioy et al, 2019;Blasio and Viviani, 2020;Dommett et al, 2020;Gerbaudo, 2021), which has sometimes spurred changes in the party organization, interactions between different party levels and actors as well as the distribution of power. Regarding candidate selection, the question of digitalization as a potentially non-hierarchic process of selection has an impact on classical party features such as inclusion/exclusion or centralization/decentralization of the party decision-making (Barnea and Rahat, 2007;Kenig, 2009;Kernell, 2015;André et al, 2017;Cordero and Coller, 2018).…”