How Digital Technologies Shape Party Membership

While significant scholarly attention has been directed to the impact of digital technologies on political campaigning and organisation, this paper focuses on the effect of digital technologies on shaping understandings and experiences of contemporary membership. By analysing the affordances offered by two widely used digital platforms – Facebook and NationBuilder – the chapter develops a new theoretical and empirical account of how digital technologies shape what it means to ‘join’ a political organisation in today’s society. It examines not only the potential of these digital platforms to facilitate the process of membership by, for example, increasing the ease of access to political organisations, but the broader potential of these technologies to respond to the expressive and social identity needs of citizens by forging collective communities through a mass of individualised actions (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). A central concern of the paper is how digital technologies have changed the nature of membership – in terms of inclusivity, responsiveness and identity – and the democratic implications of shifting the responsibility for developing and maintaining organisational frameworks from parties and groups themselves, to commercial entities such as social media companies.