Political Parties and New ICTs: Between Tradition and Innovation

The literature on party change has shown how the advent of digital revolution and the diffusion of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in XXI century’s democracies impacted on the way political parties communicate and perform their functions. Nonetheless, the literature failed insofar to address a crucial issue, i.e. political parties’ organizational reaction to the diffusion of ITCs. Our research question is thus whether ITCs impacted on party organizations and, if any, how do new ICTs impact on the organizational model of political parties. Secondly, the papers evaluate the differences between a) new and old parties and b) between parties with different ideological orientations. We hypothesize that “new” parties – being without organizational legacy – prefer what we define as “disruptive innovations”, using new ICTs as functional equivalents of old organizational infrastructures. In this case new ICTs are tools to establish direct links between leaders and members, responding to the competitive logic of challenger parties. On the contrary old parties – being subjected to the institutional inertia - introduce “sustaining innovations”, using new ICTs as additional tools for communicative or informative aims, rather than as a structural trait of the organization. Furthermore, we expect that left-wing parties use ICTs more frequently and as a way to foster greater internal democracy compared to their centre-right parties. This fact is linked to the differences in the theoretical conceptions about the party-form between parties with different ideological traditions. We will test these hypotheses through a comparative analysis of the main political parties of different party families and with different age in six European countries: Italy, Spain, France, Germany, UK and Greece.