The Impact of Platform Politics on Political Representation in Three European Cyber-Parties

This paper examines the use of different participation platforms within three European “cyber-parties,” the German Pirate Party, the Italian Five Star Movement, and the Spanish Podemos. Over the past decade these three parties have adopted participation platforms such as LiquidFeedback, Rousseau, and Plaza Podemos, respectively, to allow party members to participate directly in the drafting of program and policy proposals, select the ruling group via online consultations, and vote on strategic party decisions. Thus these tools have the ostensible function of providing incentives to ordinary party members to participate, allowing them to take on tasks and responsibilities that were previously considered a prerogative of the ruling group. It has been noted, however, that political parties have been holding internal consultations to empower their general membership so as to erode the position of party activists (who are usually the most critical of the party leadership) since well before the rise of cyber-parties (Mair 1994). From this angle, the online consultations organized by these emerging cyberparties may only consolidate the contemporary ascendency of the party in public office, which tends to become ever more autonomous (Katz and Mair 2002). Through empirical data I have collected via in-depth interviews with elected representatives and the distribution of surveys to platform users I will show how the promise of participatory democracy is frustrated by two different kinds of operations: the separation of online decision-making from offline deliberation and agenda-setting (in the case of the 5SM and Podemos); and the difficulty of reconciling online democratic practices with more traditional notions of leadership (in the case of the GPP). At the same time, some of the pioneering practices that emerge from the cyber-party model put pressure on professional politics, allowing citizens to foresee a world in which political parties will no longer hold the monopoly of representation.