All In the Same Boat ? The impact of the COVID crisis on the degree of intra-party digitalization in Belgium

In the field of party politics, the move of political parties into the digital sphere has become a fertile avenue of research in recent years. Yet, the digitalisation of parties does not entail a homogenous process of convergence towards a new mode of managing party organisations. Instead, the spread of digitalisation is producing substantial differences among forces in both the degree and the pattern of implementation of ICTs in intra-party functioning (Barbera et al., 2021: 287). It means that parties are not “digitalized” to the same extent and this can be seen when we compare them within the same, or across different, party systems. The main explanations for these differences lie in the role played by contextual factors or organizational characteristics. The question we want to address in this paper is whether and how an systemic factor like the COVID crisis has impacted the degree of intra-party digitalization among the parties. Has it crystalized, amplified or reduced the existing inequalities? First of all, like for the rest of the society, one might expect that the crisis has had an exponential effect on the digitalization practices within parties. Yet, second, it might be that the effect is either uniform across all type of parties and actually neutralize (or even amplify) the existing opposition prior the crisis. Or, it might be actually stronger for mainstream, traditional parties, for which the COVID crisis might have turned into an opportunity to bridge the gap with newer parties. To test these core hypotheses, we draw on the case of Belgium where the digitalization of parties has almost never been approached, despite the importance of parties in the political system. We propose to measure the impact of the COVID pandemic on the degree of intra-party digitalization through a quantitative analysis of survey data collected online among Belgian parties (December 2021-January 2022). We have surveyed a hundred of party actors on their practices in terms of organization and decision making before and during the crisis. They had to report following their experience in five different instances of their party, which can be organized according to the three organizational faces (on the ground, public and central office). We will stack this information in a dataset and produce an index of intra-party digitalization whose gap pre/post crisis will then be correlated with organizational characteristics of the parties (ideology, institutionalization/age, level of IPD, membership size, retrieved from existing datasets like PPDB or MAPP), while controlling for respondents’ individual profiles. In doing so, we hope to provide an original contribution on the larger debate of intra-party digitalization and whether the COVID crisis might have played as an equalizing factor putting all the parties on the same boat (or not).