Allies or Foes? The Digital and the Mass Party in Italy and Spain

The paper devises a typology of the digitisation strategies employed by party leaders to foster specific kinds of party organisations, with a particular focus on the ‘mass party’ model. The case studies – the Italian PD and Lega, and the Spanish PSOE and VOX- help identifying digitisation strategies and understand how they are meant to reshape party organisations from the perspective of party leaders. The paper aims to fill a gap in literature regarding parties’ digitisation. Indeed, a growing body of literature has dealt with models of digital organisation (see Vaccari, 2017, Gerbaudo, 2018, Deseriis, 2020), mostly focusing on whether digital platforms were playing a disintermediating function affecting the relations between activists and leadership. However, this literature has mostly focused on the outcomes of platforms on intra-party democracy, that is to say on whether digital technologies made parties more participatory and democratic, or more centralised. In answering this question, the more pessimistic observers concluded that party digitisation reinforces parties’ centralisation (see Kenig and Rahat, 2018, Gerbaudo, 2019), whereas the techno-optimists have argued that ICTs may in fact help reinvigorating grassroots political participation and intra-party democracy (see Bennett et al., 2018). Therefore, the paper focuses on how the agency of party leaders affects the adoption and use of digital technologies by their organisations, as well as the strategies of digitisation that are being adopted to maintain or alter organisational types, whether “mass”, “personal”, “electoral-professional”. Consequently, the paper addresses the main following question: how do digital tools facilitate parties’ leadership strategies to maintain mass linkages or personalise their organizations? The cases were selected to seek maximum variation regarding the relations between digitisation strategies and types of organisation in the most similar contexts regarding parties’ systems. More specifically, we looked at parties that are fostering: the mass party model of organisation or hybridising the mass party with electoral-professional one (Lega and PSOE); parties that have increasingly moved away from the mass party model (PD); parties that have adopted features of the mass party recently (Vox). We performed a content analysis of multiple sources of qualitative data -parties’ platforms and social media, national conferences resolutions- and among them we conducted 15 parties’ elites interviews, targeting officers in charge of digital organisation and communication. Based on our analysis, we devise four types of relations between parties’ digitisation and type of organisation, based on the adoption of digital tools to: 1. Create a new mass party, by prioritising online tools through which to build-up an activist base. 2. Strengthen a pre-existing mass party, by integrating online and offline activism in a way that does not alter party structures. 3. Turn the mass party into a personal one, with activists becoming ‘followers’/’fans’. 4. Facilitate the hybridisation of different models (e.g. mass and electoral professional) by redirecting the activists’ permanent campaigning activities. Therefore, the paper aims at inductively generating a theory about digitisation strategies in relation to types of organisation that may be tested and expanded through applying the typology to further cases.