The Digitalisation of Political Parties in Comparative Perspective

This chapter outlines the main findings of the edited book. Through the study of a wide range of political parties from Europe and beyond, this book has explored the different degrees of digitalisation that political parties present, and, at the same time, discussed the main technological, democratic issues and trade-offs that political parties have faced in their digital transition. The most relevant finding is that all political parties operating in the democracies analysed have digitalised their organisations to some extent. Our main finding across several cases shows that 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. Hence, future research may benefit from paying more attention to how mainstream parties are dealing with ICTs and how they adapt to this digital transformation. Furthermore, future research must strengthen its comparative approach in order to identify general patterns of digitalisation among parties, going beyond the analysis of digital native parties.