Selecting Candidates Online in Europe: A Comparison Among the Cases of M5S, Podemos and European Green Party

Candidate Selection, Personalization and Different Logics of Centralization in New Southern European Populism: The Cases of Podemos and the M5S

“…From an empirical viewpoint, we have shown that, in line with other studies (Lanzone and Rombi 2018;Pérez-Nievas et al 2018), these parties' participatory and radically democratic rhetoric does not match the rules and practices of candidate selection. The idea that power in new populist parties of Southern Europe is concentrated in their leadership is not new (Cordero et al 2018;Deseriis and Vittori 2019; Gerbaudo 2018), but by disentangling personalization and centralization, we can better understand the mechanisms of power consolidation.…”

“…Schattschneider (1942: 64) stressed more than 70 years ago, candidate selection is 'one of the best points at which to observe the distribution of power within the party'. In fact, just a few studies focus on the candidate selection processes in these parties (on Podemos, Pérez-Nievas et al 2018; on the M5S, Seddone and Rombi 2018) and comparative research is rare (for exceptions, see Lanzone and Rombi 2018;Mikola 2019).…”

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

“…They have, however, been attracting attention from the academic literature in recent years, specifically through a multiplication of case-studies or small-scale comparisons, which highlighted the fact that not all parties and party systems were equally eager nor equipped to handle digitalization (Thuermer et al, 2016;Bennett et al, 2017;Lisi, 2019) and showed how dependent on party context the general results were. Most studies on parties digitalization were also analyzing new and populist parties (Mikola, 2017;Lanzone and Rombi, 2018;Caiani et al, 2021), which have been arguably keener in embracing this trend than established parties and have tended to equate this push toward more direct and inclusive democracy as the only path toward more democracy in general. The conclusion of this research is somewhat ambiguous.…”

“…A first hint in favor of this hypothesis could be found when comparing the composition of established parties to the composition of new populist parties and party-movements. If the latter tend to rely a lot more on digital tools, they also tend to have younger members and more female members than traditional parties (Lanzone and Rombi, 2018;Lavezzolo and Ramiro, 2018;, which hints at age and gender-and more generally social characteristics-being a possible factor. This hypothesis is also supported by the results of Close, Kelbel and van Haute for the general population of voters (Close et al, 2017), and is coherent with a more general discourse about the aspirations to more inclusive or "renewed" forms of democracy, that younger, more educated voters might share.…”

How Democracy Works within a Populist Party: Candidate Selection in the Alternative for Germany

“…Examples are the Italian 5 Star Movement (Mosca and Tronconi 2019) or Podemos in Spain (Kioupkiolis and Pérez 2018). Both use digital tools for the orchestrated participation of their members in the nomination of candidates as well as for adopting their manifestos (Lanzone and Rombi 2018). However, for both, an asymmetrical balance of power in favour of the party leaders has also been demonstrated (Caiani et al 2021), which in turn refers to a central element of the older populist parties.…”