The COVID-19 pandemic as critical juncture for membership integration

The year 2020 goes down in history as the year the COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide. While the disease has primarily threatened public health, it has also posed unprecedented challenges to political parties. In times of lockdowns and social distancing, the need for rapid and innovative solutions that facilitate the continued functioning of the party apparatus has been ubiquitous, especially regarding membership integration (Fitzpatrick, 2021). Besides being a short-term replacement of (mostly offline) routines of party members, experiences with new ways of engaging have possibly led to identifying several areas of improvement, as intra-party digitalisation had been lagging prior to the pandemic. The pandemic as an external shock and digitalisation as an overarching environmental trend (Harmel & Janda, 1994) create a constructive interference1; leading to an exceptionally high pressure for organisational adaptation. In this context, a shift in modes of participation potentially alters the nature of party membership and power relations inside the organisation. Usually, intra-party digitalisation is considered to favour the institutional relations between the party elites and its members (Lusoli & Ward, 2004, p. 465). On the other hand, Deseriis (2020) distinguishes between two variants of the digital party: the centralised and leader-oriented platform party and the de-centralised networked party. The digitalisation of member participation does not necessarily lead to an individualised or atomised membership with weakened mid-level activists. A digitalised party where these functionaries act as essential nodes in a networked structure is also possible. The affordances and characteristics of such a digital collective organisation have rarely been considered (Faucher, 2015). In this conceptual paper, I elaborate on why we will likely see substantial changes and even party reforms (Gauja, 2017) emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic. It holds the potential to be a critical juncture (Twigg, 2020) for the digitalisation of party member integration, even though the “crucial impact on outcomes later in time” (Capoccia, 2016, p. 1) are yet to be observed. I argue that the enforced digitalisation has disrupted existing routines (Ziegler et al., 2023) and, thus, has opened a window of opportunity for change. Hence, the pandemic has probably heightened the members’ awareness of the convenience of technology for member engagement, making it more likely for digital solutions to be requested and adopted on a larger scale. On the other hand, members might have gained a clearer picture of the setbacks of digital participation. Thus, the article seeks to link pandemic-related research to the scholarly literature on party change and elaborates on possible paths of development. Hence, it provides a framework for future studies that go beyond the short-term disruptions of party-organisational routines.