Is gamification the road toward more inclusive internal party democracy? An analysis of the first gamified candidate-selection procedure

Is gamification the road toward more inclusive internal party democracy? An analysis of the first gamified candidate-selection procedure Digital platforms are becoming more popular among political parties, and in some cases digital affordances replaced some of the core functions of party organization. One innovative way of involving members in party activities is through gamification experiences. Gamification is defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. According to its advocates, through the use of tools characteristic of videogames such as points, badges and leaderboards, it could provide positive and engaging experiences. However, gamification is not a politically neutral practice, but a product of particular cultural and political circumstances, linked to consumerization, surveillance and neoliberalism. In this paper, we ask if gamification is able to promote members’ participation and internal party-democracy using the Five Star Movement as a case study. Although this kind of experiments are not much so far, the importance of gamification is likely to grow in the future. FSM introduced for the first time a gamified version of party primaries in 2019, and replicated the experiment in 2020 for the selection of members entitled to speak in the first party congress. We show that, despite the construction of a “neutral” environment and a system aimed at promoting the most active members on the platform (the so-called “merit system”), the result was that, as in the off-line world, the visibility and celebrity of the candidates was the main asset to win the contest. Despite the promises, the “usual” dynamics of intra-party democracy were replicated through gamification, reasserting the existence and relevance of asymmetric relations of power.