Digital Disruptors No More? The De-Digitalisation of Digital Parties as Ideological Normalisation: The cases of Podemos and the 5 Stars Movement

The paper develops the argument that since the late 2010s ‘digital parties’ have gone through a phase of de-digitalisation concerning first and foremost the ideologically loaded views of platforms themselves. I argue that this digital ‘backlash’ is the result of an ideological normalisation of outsider digital parties that results, alongside their institutionalisation, from losing the momentum of the progressive ‘digital ideologies’ within the emergence of a hegemonic ‘techno-nativism’ which shifted the views around digital platforms from the enthusiasm for their disruptive democratising function to pessimistic views on social media as spaces of the assemblage of various alt-right coalitions. The ideological views and beliefs around digital platforms as powerful tools bearers of a disruptive change of the mechanisms of representative (party) democracy were acknowledged by Gerbaudo as the main defining feature of the ‘digital parties’ alongside the adoption of platforms as the cornerstones of the organisational architectures of these movements. However, when analysing the evolutions of the incremental or decremental implementations of digital platforms by the ‘digital parties’, the relevance of this ideological content has been overlooked in the literature. The paper seeks to address this gap through an in-depth examination of the leaders’ discourses and digital platforms of the two most widely exemplary cases of digital parties: The Spanish Podemos and the Italian 5 Stars Movement -5SM- (e.g. Gerbaudo, 2018, 2019; Deseriis and Vittori, 2019). The paper traces the evolutions of parties (de-)digitalisation alongside the main processes of ideological change. While, in literature, both cases have been labelled as populist movements, I argue that what best define the ideological origins of these movements are a post-social democratic (in the case of Podemos, see: Guglielmo, unpublished) and a techno-populist (in the case of the 5SM, see: Caruso, 2017). In both cases, these ideologies claimed that platforms might be powerful tools to disrupt corrupted party systems and they inspired the adoption of deliberative platforms as a prefiguration of a new model of democratic relations. However, since the late 2010s and more intensely since the early 2020s, both movements abandoned these ideological postures vis-à-vis digital platforms. Starting from partially distinct ideologies, I find that Podemos and the 5-Star Movement are converging towards a (re-)social democratic ideology positing the primacy of welfare states and labourers protection within representative democracies. I conclude that this twin de-digitalisation (organisational as ideological) originates, alongside their involvement in national governments, from the changing landscape concerning the ’hegemony’ over digital platforms. Indeed, while during the early 2010s at the crossroads of multiple crises of global economy and European party systems, progressive views around platforms as democratic disruptors provided a momentum for these new parties to emerge, since 2016, especially after the victory of Trump, these progressive views were more and more marginalised as a new hegemony of the alt-right above and within social platforms gained ground. The paper is exploratory in nature and seeks to provide an original theoretical framework to analyse the relations between organisation and ideology in platform societies.