Why parties introduce digital democratic innovations?

Political parties have been recently implementing digital democratic innovations (DDI) based on the use of digital platforms as a tool to re-engage citizens, improve their deliberative processes and expand members’ possibilities of participation in the decision-making. Although these innovations were initially conducted by new-born parties inspired by grassroots democracy approaches, DDI have been gradually adopted by a wide spectrum of parties. Indeed, current agreement tends to locate the digital democratic burden not between newer and older parties, but related to ideological factors. However, literature is far from establishing a definitive and unique factor explaining the phenomenon. On the contrary, other variables such as the stability of the party system and the emergence of competitors have been discussed as possible incentives for democratic innovations. For instance, a better understanding is needed on how these factors interact and under what conditions political parties are more likely to implement digital innovations, as well as to reject them. Basing on previous research, our aim is to identify those circumstances in which parties tend to introduce digital democracy innovations. To do so, we merge the several proposed variables and compare their statistical significance in a European-level sample. With this regard, we present two sets of incentives classified according to their “external” or “internal” origin: on the one hand, internal factors refer to inherent conditions of each party, such as ideology, leader’s age and organisation’s longevity, that might explain a higher or lower degree of sensibility towards participatory demands and democratic innovations. On the other hand, external factors include the competition context, considering the existence of rival parties that present DDI. In addition, citizens’ capacity to interact online with political parties, defined by the digital adoption index, might condition in the first place the possibilities of DDI implementation. Our main expectations are that digital democratic innovations will be more likely to be found in: first, parties on the left and with young representatives; and second, parties competing in highly digitalised party systems whose rivals present DDI as well.