When do parties go digital? Examining the drivers of internal and external party digitalisation

Our paper investigates the drivers of party digitalisation, measuring the influence of environmental factors, inter-party competition and party characteristics on the utilisation of digital tools. The main innovation of this paper is to propose a measurement of digitalisation that classifies digital...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Mompó, Adrià, Meloni, Marco, Barberà, Oscar, Sandri, Giulia, Von Nostitz, Felix, Lupato García, Fabio
Tipo de documento: artigo
Data de publicação:2025
País:España
Recursos:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositório:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/120869
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/120869
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:316
329
political parties
digitalisation
digital contagion
Partidos y grupos políticos
5902 Ciencias Políticas
5905.06 Partidos Políticos
Descrição
Resumo:Our paper investigates the drivers of party digitalisation, measuring the influence of environmental factors, inter-party competition and party characteristics on the utilisation of digital tools. The main innovation of this paper is to propose a measurement of digitalisation that classifies digital processes according to their functions and goals: an internal dimension oriented towards participation and members’ engagement, and an external dimension focused on communication and campaigning. Data has been extracted from the DIGIPART database on parties’ digital procedures by Meloni et al. (2024). Our findings highlight the importance of parties’ organisational and ideological features in explaining their internal digitalisation, but not the external. In terms of participation, bigger parties tend to implement more initiatives for online participation, while right-wing parties are less prone to digitalise their internal structures. These effects are reinforced by competition between rivals and contagion processes, which exert positive influence both at the internal and external levels.