Beyond Election Campaigns: Political Parties and the Use of Digitalization in Daily Politics

Political parties have adapted to the increasing importance of the digital environment in people’s lives. Over the last two decades, the literature on the relationship between political parties and digitalization has flourished and developed in three main directions. One strand focuses extensively on political communication and marketing, showing how political parties use websites, internet platforms or social media to communicate with voters and seek electoral support (Cameron, Barrett and Stewardson, 2016; Kreiss, 2016; Magin et al., 2017; Spierings and Jacobs, 2018). A second line of enquiry investigates the effects of digital communication on voters in the form of online epistemic bubbles, echo-chambers, filters, or ideological polarization (Flaxman, Goel and Rao, 2016; Geschke, Lorenz and Holtz, 2019; Humprecht, Hellmueller and Lischka, 2020). A third direction of research looks at the digital innovations for party organization, including intra-party decision-making and the general challenges associated with them (Gerbaudo, 2019; Deseriis, 2020; Barberà et al., 2021; De Marco et al., 2022). All these indicate that we know much about how parties use digitalization during elections but that there is limited information about its role in party politics between elections. There is also an important territorial imbalance in the literature, with most of the research conducted on advanced democracies rather than new democracies or democratizing countries. This Workshop seeks to address both gaps in the literature by focusing on three specific and under-studied dimensions for analysis:  intra-party communication  attitudes towards digitalization  the appeal of digitalization to different segments in society, and how these segments use it. This approach is scientifically relevant because it may provide a detailed view about the role of digitalization in everyday political life. A great deal of party activities take place between elections and at various levels of representation (local, regional and central) and may involve different actors (e.g. social movements, interest groups, etc.). Moreover, understanding the mechanisms associated with party digitalization and peoples’ attitudes – inside and outside parties – can inform future organizational changes in the direction of using more (or less) digitalization and the functions developed by distinct digital tools or platforms. Knowledge from different territorial realities might also point out different adaptation strategies and uses of the digital. The Workshop has four objectives. It aims to: 1. Address theoretically the relationship between political parties and digitalization in everyday politics, beyond electoral communication and gains. 2. Analyze the ways digitalization influences internal party communication: how and why staff do things differently online vs offline, how political activities change, and with what consequences (linkage, internal party democracy, staff change, (de)institutionalisation, etc.) for the party, or how party members engage online post-pandemic. 3. Identify and explain the attitudes of voters, members and political elites towards digitalization – or its absence – of their political parties. 4. Illustrate ways in which different segments in party membership and the electorate (young, savvy, educated, elderly, belonging to minority groups etc.) use digitalization (or not) to engage with parties.