Digital Innovations, Party Organization and Intra-Party Democracy

Digital Democratic Innovations applied to different party activities, following the Five-Pillar Model of parties' migration into the digital (Fiztpatrick 2021) have been receiving growing scholars' attention during last years. Assessments of digital parties and digital democratic innovations vary from "cyber optimistic" to "cyber pessimistic" views with regards to the Intra-Party Democracy, the internal power relations and sharing, the participation and the quality of party democracy (Barberà, Sandri, Correa and Rodríguez-Teruel, 2021 ). The paper aims to shed light on (1) the relationship between different types of party organizations and the implementation of Digital Innovations; and (2) the impact of Digital Innovations on Indra-Party Democracy and the type of party. The main research questions this study tries to answer are: Is there a relation between the party's age and digital innovations? New parties with weak organization, structures and number of members, and supposedly more prone to implement digital innovations, are they also developing inclusive procedures of decision-making and party members involvement? The paper proposes to analyze the digital democratic innovations in the case of newly appeared parties in Bulgaria.