Digital Transformation of Political Parties Within the Visegrad Region: A Comparative Analysis

The scholarly work examining the internal alterations associated with the digital transformation of political party organizations revealed how the use of digital tools provides various alternative methods for campaigning by members and supporters of political parties and emphasized their roles as instruments for party management, members recruitment, participation, and mobilization. The aim of our paperis to establish a relationship between digitalization and stages of party development while mapping the levels of digitalization across six dimensions. Party digital features were coded using the DIGIPART codebook and are based on identified digital practices and offered functionalities within a range of nearly 30 political parties. During the 2010s, political parties in Western Europe witnessed a substantial integration of digital innovations; nevertheless, the parties within the Visegrad region (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) commenced the adoption of these advancements at a comparatively later juncture and with a certain degree of reluctance, if at all.. In order to address the predominance of single case studies and binary comparisons in empirical research, a comparative study of the Visegrad countries is proposed. This study aims to enhance broader generalisations about these transformative processes. The objective of the comparative paper is to elucidate which functionalities have been digitalised and the extent to which political parties in the Visegrad region have digitalised its intra-party decision making processes, participatory tools and resource organisation.