Who Gains from Digitalisation? Examining Party Organisation in Spain and the UK

Digital technologies have become integral to contemporary party politics, yet their impact on party organisation has received uneven attention. Existing scholarship demonstrates that all parties have digitalised aspects of their organisation (Barberà et al., 2021), but most studies either focus on specific dimensions—such as member participation (Vittori, 2020) or electoral campaigning (Dommett et al., 2024)—or examine the functional roles of digitalisation (Sandri et al., 2024). Less explored is the question of which organisational face benefits most: the party in public office, the party in central office, or the party on the ground. Cyber optimists anticipated that digitalisation would revitalise grassroots activism through enhanced mobilisation and recruitment, whereas cyber pessimists warned of increased centralisation and exclusion, deepening the digital divide (Barberà et al., 2021). Empirical evidence largely supports the latter, with members and activists—the party on the ground—often disadvantaged by organisational change (Vittori, 2020; García Lupato and Meloni, 2023). Historically, innovations such as mass media and state funding similarly strengthened the party in public office at the expense of grassroots actors (Kirchheimer 1966; Panebianco 1988; Katz and Mair 1995). Digitalisation further consolidates the autonomy of the party in public office by facilitating direct candidate–voter communication, particularly in campaigning (Dommett et al., 2024). Consequently, previous research has shown that certain faces of the party organisation have not only adapted, but seemed to even gain prominence (Katz and Mair, 1993, 2018; Gauja and Kosiara-Pedersen,2021). In resource-constrained contexts, investment in digital tools signals organisational priorities and strategic trade-offs between online and offline activities. To better understand internal party dynamics in the face of digitalisation requires attention to all three faces of party organisation. Building on the DIGIPART dataset, this paper examines patterns of digitalisation across the three faces of party organisations in Spain and the UK, offering new insights into how new technologies impact parties’ internal power structures and organisational adaptation.