Is Digitalisation an Issue in Party Competition?

Digitalisation is a relatively new political topic that gained some interest in party research with the emergence and short-lived electoral success of Pirate parties. The small body of extant research on its ongoing role in party competition shows that parties mention digitalisation to varying degrees in their manifestos and identifies some causal explanations for this variance. It also observes a high volatility between elections with regard to the specific digitalisation-related topics that are mentioned in manifestos: Broadband access and closing the digital divide are out, platform regulation and advancing AI development are in. However, even while acknowledging this volatility, the literature implicitly assumes that "digitalisation" is in fact a full-fledged issue parties compete on. I argue instead that the status of digitalisation as a new issue in party competition is an unanswered empirical question that depends on the strategies parties use to (not) emphasise digitalisation in campaigns and programmes: They can ignore or downplay digitalisation, they can integrate it into established issues such as economic policy or they can construct ‘digital policy’ as a new coherent issue. Thereby, parties play an active role in shaping discourses on digitalisation both in campaigns as well as in government. This paper presents preliminary results of a comparative analysis of party manifestos and aims to answer two research questions: Which salience do parties attribute to digitalisation in their manifestos? And (how) do they relate digitalisation to other political issues? The analysis aims to shed light on both the (de)politicisation of the digital transformation and AI as well as the way in which parties incorporate new social problems and phenomena into the set of established issues they compete on.