The Impact of Digitalized Political Communication on Parties' Opinion Formation and Interest Mediation Function: A Conceptual View

The omnipresence of social media has substantially influenced political parties' structures and intermediation processes of communication in the last decade, especially during election campaigns (Chadwick/Stromer-Galley 2016, Stromer-Galley 2014). By incorporating digital technology from their inception, new parties have unleashed a hitherto unknown potential of reaching out to voters while old parties have struggled to adapt to maintain their competitive advantages (Hatch 2015). From a democratic process perspective this also means that the digital communication environment with its hybrid media system (Chadwick 2013) challenges the original functioning of parties as transmitters between state and society. As public opinion formation and interest mediation are significantly shaped by political parties' 'communicative hinge function' (Sarcinelli 1998), digitalized political communication via social media could have a huge impact on the quality of the democratic process. Adding to the debate on the consequences of the digital age for democracy, the contribution theoretically elaborates on the impact of digitalized political communication on parties' opinion formation and interest mediation function. Despite a vast amount of empirically analyzed developments in the digital age, scientific debates often lack a coherent conceptual grounding on the impact of online media on parties' organization and communication. Additionally, existing literature on changing political communication of organizations so far remains detached from debates on whether digitalization has had a positive, negative, neutral or other impact on democracy (Lachapelle/Maarek 2015, Kneuer 2016). This missing link is found in studies on the use of new technologies in intra-party communication (Pedersen/Saglie 2005), external communication during election campaigns (Jungherr 2016, Stromer-Galley 2014), as well as the changing nature of party membership in the digital age (Gibson/Greffet/Cantijoch 2017). Following the claim that 'the consequences of the internet for politics' (Farrell 2012) need to be disentangled and divided into single phenomena, the contribution provides a theoretical input to a single aspect of the debate on the impact of social media on political parties. By linking concepts of structural change in political communication caused by online media (Donges/Nitschke 2018, Dohle/Jandura/Vowe 2014) with party organization research, the contribution will theoretically show how the digitalization driven change in parties' political communication could affect the processes of opinion formation and interest mediation that parties perform in the democratic process (Römmele 2003). Hence, the article links debates on changing political communication of parties with debates on the impact of digitalization on democracy. This will be done in four steps. First, dimensions of political communication change due to social media will be presented regarding the question of how those channels and their logics (Chadwick 2013, Kalsnes/Larsson/Enli 2017) affect political organizations. Second, political parties will be conceptualized as communicating organizations from a meso-perspective, using both concepts from organizational sociology and political communication research. Third, processes of opinion formation and interest mediation will be elucidated to show parties' communicative function in them. Fourth, the conclusion provides a discussion on how digitalized political communication of parties might impact on the two mentioned processes and, more generally, democracy.