Dimensions of Digital Futures: A Comparative Analysis of Party Discourse on Digitalisation and AI

Political parties play a key role in proposing different visions and policy ideas for the future. Increasingly, political parties are offering voters competing policy proposals about digitalisation and AI. Yet, research into how political parties are reacting to this emerging policy field is scant. This is primarily due to two reasons: First, digitalisation and AI research tends to focus only on the state and government, omitting the interplay of different political actors. Second, prominent datasets and research approaches on party politics do not account for the relatively recent issues of digitalisation and AI and thus cannot be fruitfully used to study parties’ reactions. Against the background of potential politicisation of digitalisation related issues, analysing parties’ positions on these issues is important as parties' positions on digitalisation and AI might be connected to their broader policy portfolios or electoral strategies. By studying party manifestos, it will be possible to capture the rhetoric that parties use to frame their positions on digitalisation and AI. Previous research has analysed sub-issues of digitalisation in party manifestos and attempted to map parties’ positions using multidimensional scaling analysis (König, 2019). Similarly, a different strand of scholarship underlined the relevance of ideologies such as technocracy and populism for recent party discourses (Bertsou & Caramani, 2020; Bickerton & Accetti, 2018). This raises an interesting question: which discourses and ideologies are digitalisation and AI linked to? This paper analyses parties’ positions on digitalisation and AI in relation to left-right statements, and to relevant broader discourses such as neoliberalism, populism, or technocracy. It will investigate the European context where digitalisation and AI have become politicised across countries and levels of governance, as the examples of the GDPR, the AI safety summit, and the EU AI act demonstrate. Within this context, this paper focuses specifically on digitalisation and AI discourse in nationally represented political parties from three European countries: Germany, France, and the UK. It will rely on manual content analysis of quasi-sentences covering digitalisation or AI in party manifestos, focussing on the 2019 and 2024 European elections and the last two national elections within each country. The results of this research will provide insight into the extent to which digital discourse is politicised along a left-right dimension, and how ideologies such as populism, technocracy, or neoliberalism are connected to how these discourses unfold. Consequently, this research can provide nuance to political scientists’ understanding of how digitalisation and AI discourse fit into larger party-political orientations. These results have implications for imaginaries of (de)politicised digital futures, while allowing for comparisons to other political contexts. References: Bertsou, E., & Caramani, D. (Eds.). (2020). The Technocratic Challenge to Democracy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429342165 Bickerton, C., & Accetti, C. I. (2018). ‘Techno-populism’ as a new party family: The case of the Five Star Movement and Podemos. Contemporary Italian Politics, 10(2), 132–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2018.1472919 König, P. D. (2019). Signs of convergence in party policies on digital technologies. A comparative analysis of party policy stances in Ireland and Germany. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 16(2), 137–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2019.1613280