Digitalization and dedigitalization: organisational equilibrium and transformation of political parties’ digital ecosistems

In the fourth and data-driven era of communication (Dommett, Barclay, Gibson, 2023), many parties new and old are forced to confront a new ecosystem, characterized by the widespread use of new communication and digital technologies. Rapidly changing digital technologies that have become essential for running election campaigns, communicating with members and the public, and even for organizational and decision-making processes within the organizations. It is precisely for these reasons that recent years have witnessed the emergence of new political formations that have made the digital their main feature (Barberà et al. 2021). Thus, scholars talked of the emergence of digital parties (Gerbaudo 2021) that can be considered a new subtype of the electoral model. At the same time, however, the maintenance of digital innovations in the face of competitive challenges and processes of party institutionalization has seemed far from simple, and in some cases there have been reverse processes of de-digitization. A paradigmatic case of this transformation is the 5 Star Movement in Italy, which was born as a digital party but has significantly downsized the use of digital tools, abandoning the platform that originally constituted its organizational structure in favour of the use of digital services provided by external actors. This has impacted on the party’s organizational model, but also on its digital ecosystem (Dommett et al. 2021). Starting with the case of M5s, the paper aims to explore the composition and transformation of different digital party ecosystems in Italy and Spain, identifying the actors that gravitate around the parties, the type of services provided and the implications on the decision-making autonomy of the organizations themselves. It intends to contribute to the development of the analysis of the digital ecosystem of parties with reference to democracies that have not yet received great scholarly attention and to broaden the analysis of parties’ relations with external digital providers even beyond campaign periods