Digital Intra-Party Democracy: A multi-party analysis of the Spanish party system

The role of technology is growing in intra-party democracy (IPD) processes. As scholarly attention is rising, we aim to analyse the impact of this technologies on digital IPD, meaning existing or new internal procedures that are digitalised to a certain extent. Building on previous research, this paper applies a methodology based on the five dimensions of empirical democratic theory at the basis of V-dem project – the electoral, liberal, deliberative, participatory and egalitarian dimensions – for mapping digital IPD initiatives in the Spanish party system. The analysis focuses on the five biggest state wide Spanish parties, namely Psoe, Pp, Vox, Podemos and Ciudadanos. This selection includes both traditional and new parties as well as left- and right-wings ones, thus providing an expected variance in their development of digital IPD. To what extent parties have implemented digital IPD procedures? What dimensions of democracy are more digitalised? Is there a difference between digital IPD between new and established parties or depending on their ideology? The aim of this paper is to map digital IPD in these five parties and test two main hypotheses. Firstly, our differential impact hypothesis implies that the use and impact of technology and digitalisation is not neutral, as some dimensions of democracy are more digitalised than others, particularly depending on easiness for digitalisation as well as strategic considerations of the leadership. Accordingly, we expect that the electoral and participatory dimensions will be more digitalised than the rest. Secondly, within the debate between innovation and normalization of technology within parties, we develop a second hypothesis: the convergent hypothesis. It considers that even if different parties may start in a different level of digitalisation – new, and even digital parties, with more initial digital procedures than established ones –, their digital IPD scores can be closer than expected, due to the growing relevance of party digitalisation, enhanced by the COVID-19 context, together with different setbacks in more digital parties, notably Podemos. Although, we expect that ideology and, especially, parties’ strong commitment towards members’ (and citizens’) participation, may play a major role. The purpose of this paper is to provide further insights on the ongoing debate of the digitalisation of political parties and the role of technology on intra-party democracy and its consequences.