The Institutionalization of Party Organizations in a New Environment: The Party-on-the-Web

In recent years, political parties have increasingly relied on the Internet and on new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as cheaper and no-mediated communication channels and as electoral campaigns’ devices as well. Beyond the external implications of parties’ reliance on ICTs (Gibson, 2015), their organizational dimension has been affected by these transformations. Some scholars have investigated the impact of these new technologies on party organizations and have theorized the emergence of “network-based” parties (Heidar and Saglie 2003) and, even, of “cyber-parties” (Margetts 2006). In contemporary democracies, old parties are investing significant resources for expanding their “online” presence alongside their “offline” structures, and for building what may be called, paraphrasing Katz and Mair, the on-the-web face of party organizations (Party-on-the Web). On the other hand, and following the wave of public distrust towards traditional parties, new parties have been formed from scratch starting from an online platform, such as “Podemos” in Spain or, albeit partially, the “5 Stars Movement” in Italy, and only afterwards these new parties have tried to develop their “offline” presence. The present paper proposes to address this new phenomenon in a comparative perspective and to investigate which is, if any, the role of this new “online” dimension in the process of party institutionalization and how new parties, originally formed in an “online” environment, move forward their institutionalization.