Innovations within Partido Popular: Primaries, and what else?

During the last years, the Spanish Partido Popular has introduced some organisational democratic innovations, electing their national leader through a multi-stage method with primary elections as initial voting, for the first time in 2018. On the other hand, the PP has adapted their functioning to the new trends of digitalisation of politics, especially what concerns the communicative field, with a strong presence in social networks and more transparency on their website. However, other initiatives such as the “Office of the President” – an advisory committee outside the official party structure– of the new leader, Núñez Feijóo, could put a brake on the democratization of internal decision-making processes, concentrating power even more in the hands of the leader, in a party with a markedly presidential tradition and which has often shown resistances to change. It is also important to find out if there are new ways of participation and deliberation for members, supporters and third organisations in the processes related to the party's policy development. In this paper we propose to identify the main organisational innovations of Partido Popular in the last decade and to assess to what extent some aspects of the party can be considered more democratic whereas others would remain more restricted in terms of inclusiveness and quality of participation.