Over the last decade, parties have been increasingly using digital tools to interact with their members and supporters. This shift has accompanied a wider trend toward declining party membership and the introduction of ‘looser’ ways of involvement which open up new categories of affiliation, such as becoming a party ‘friend’. The nature and implications of these online relationships for parties in terms of how far they provide a new pool of supporters and if so, what this means for the internal structures and power of elites has become a subject of increasing interest for scholars. As yet not a huge amount of empirical data exists on these questions, except on the cases of Danemark and Norway (Heidar, Pedersen and Saglie, 2012) and the UK in the early 2000s (Lusoli and Ward, 2004). Recently, studies from the ‘top down’ of the new supporter hub sites has also been produced (Gibson, 2013). This paper seeks to address this gap by examining a range of data on French parties, their members and supporters during the 2012 Presidential election campaign. Specifically we first use representative survey data to identify digital party activists during the campaign and identify their key characteristics and how they differ to non-digital activists. We then use an online sample created during the campaign of party activists (members and non-members) to probe more deeply the motives and levels of involvement and attachment of those who were active online for the party and particularly to compare those who have joined online with those who joined offline. Finally we examine the party websites and supporter hubs to understand how far the parties themselves promoted digital activism. The work is designed to show how the web may be creating new digital circles of party association and what this means for the future of party.
