Party Digitalisation in Europe: a Comparative Analysis of the DIGIPART Database

Party digitalisation has become a widespread subfield within the study of party politics, tackling several approaches: from the utilisation of digital tools for promoting intra-party democracy (IDP) (Bennet et al., 2018; Gerbaudo, 2018), to its adoption for communication and campaigning (Dommet et al., 2024). Multiple studies have highlighted the profound effects that this transformation has exerted over the linkage function of political parties (Scarrow, 2014; Gauja, 2015), its internal organisation (Barberà et al., 2021) or its role as participative and deliberative arenas (Wolkenstein & Ivernizzi-Accetti, 2017; Deseriis, 2020). Nevertheless, it is still a field dominated by case studies and small comparisons, which constrain our capacity to stablish generalisable patterns and causal effects. Few investigations on the topic have taken important steps in this direction, assessing how party features or environmental conditions influence party digitalisation, although their samples have so far been limited to a small group of Western European countries (Sandri et al., 2023; González-Cacheda and Outeda, 2024; Mompó et al., 2025). The latest version of the DIGIPART- Digitalisation in Parties database (Meloni et al., 2024), aims to address this gap by exploring the digital transformation of every major party from 20 European countries. Inspired by previous theoretical models (Fiztpatrick, 2021; García Lupato and Meloni, 2023), the data is classified in different areas of the party organisation, including communication functions and IDP (plebiscitary procedures and deliberative affordances). This operationalisation allows quantitative measurements of digitalisation, structured in externally (voters) and internally (members) oriented functions. Our aim is to explore the digital transformation of political parties, analysing the impact of different variables: intra-party features (ideology, size, resources, age), inter-party competition and party system factors. So far, evidence suggests that there is a gap between communication and IDP functions, being the former more developed. Furthermore, leftist, bigger parties competing in highly digitalised environments utilise digital tools for a greater extent and in a greater array of arenas. However, our extended sample may question previous findings if more outliers and non-mainstream cases are included, mostly from Eastern and Central Europe. This paper benefits from the greater reach of the current data to test what we know so far on the drivers and characteristics of party digitalisation. In addition, it might capture regional variation and point the effect of geographical divides over parties’ organisational strategies.