Regulating E-Democracy: A Framework to Study Political Party’s Online Decision-Making and its Democratic Consequences

Over the past decades digital technologies have developed into tools of political deliberation and decision-making by the state and parties alike (Chadwick, 2006, 2013; Koc-Michalska & Lilleker, 2016). However, while many states developed strict rules on how to regulate and govern the use of internet devices in electoral affairs, online voting or referendums, it is not clear to what extent these regulations also apply to online decisions within political parties. Parties are in essence private organizations, and it is still debatable whether they have to submit to state rules on the use of Information and Communication Technologies or if they develop self-imposed regulations. The question emerges if parties’ online activities should be publicly regulated and if so, whether they should be governed by the same state laws regulating the use of digital technologies by public actors or rather by laws applying to private companies. In both cases, it is necessary to explore what is the current state of public regulations on the use of ICTs by political organizations and what measures could be adopted to ensure accountability, fairness and transparency in how and when parties use digital technologies in their organizational settings. In order to address these questions, the paper bridges previous literature on digital politics, state regulation of parties and party organizations. The paper first offers a review of the current laws and regulations that exist to guide the use of digital devices in internal decision-making by parties. The paper then suggest a framework for empirically assessing the consequences of such regulations (or of their absence) for parties as organization and democracy as a whole. The proposed framework allows to study how regulations can either positively or negatively affect participation (in terms of inclusiveness of digital organizational processes), representation, competiveness, responsiveness and transparency of parties’ decision-making activities online. An ineffective type of regulation might undermine the potentially positive and empowering nature of these new ways to involve members and supporters in party decision-making processes or their ability to act as true deliberative forums for policy formulation (Gadras and Greffet, 2013; Gibson et al., 2013). The last section the paper provides some empirical examples to illustrate the variation of state regulation on these activities, by exploring the use of digital devices in the last rounds of online voting in the Italian Five Star Movement or in the French UMP 2014 mayoral primary in Paris. More generally, this paper contributes to our understanding of the still relatively new concept of political organization in the digital era and how the new ICTs affects both the internal and external functions of parties both as electoral actors and as membership organizations.