No Digital Leader, No Party. The Evolution of Political Digitalisation in Italy

In recent years, the Italian political landscape has seen a significant transformation, characterised not only by the emergence of a new ‘digital party’, but also by the strengthening of existing digital leaders. This article analyses the process of party digitalisation, highlighting how the rise and professionalisation of digital communication has consolidated some leaders, rather than favouring the creation of new political formations/communities based on digital platforms. The concept of digital party, associated with organization such as the Five Star Movement (M5S), which originated through a strong online component, has given way to a greater leaderisation of politics, in which party leaders use social media and digital technologies to reinforce their image and mobilise consensus. In this scenario, the ‘digital leader’ has emerged as the focus of political communication, exploiting platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok to reach the public without traditional mediation. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it takes up the theoretical challenge of taking stock of the most recent literature on ‘party digitisation’. After Gerbaudo (2019)’s pioneering research, there are in fact few attempts to conceptualise the topic of digital parties and, even from a comparative perspective, there is not much research on this process. Secondly, it investigate – leveraging on a set of qualitative interviews conducted among national digital experts and party social media manager – whether and how the increasing digital political leadership of the five largest Italian parties (Fratelli d'Italia, Partito Democratico, Lega, M5S and Forza Italia) has changed their internal dynamics, through a centralisation of decision-making power and a reduction of the spaces for internal democratic participation. This phenomenon suggests a strengthening of digital leadership as a process unrelated to the digital evolution of party organization and could therefore further undermine the latter’s ability to function as collective democratic structures.