Rethinking Evolutionary Typologies of Party Organization in the Age of Digital and AI Disintermediation

Recent transformations in party organizations driven by digital technologies and artificial intelligence call for a reconsideration of evolutionary typologies of political parties. Influential taxonomies remain fundamental for understanding party evolution (Gunther and Diamond, 2003; Katz and Mair, 1995 and 2009), yet both struggle to accommodate forms of organization that characterize the digital age. Building on disintermediation theories (Gerbaudo, 2019; Deseriis, 2019), which highlights the progressive erosion of mediating structures between leaders and citizens, this paper explores whether emerging digital and AI-based parties represent genuinely new species of political parties or rather digital evolutions of existing models. In this regard, the paper will revisit and critically discuss evolutionary theories of parties through the main organisational features found in new party organisations emerged since the early 2010s. The comparative literature has been divided on this issue. Some authors emphasized the rise of a new model where new forms of digital mediation were leading towards more disintermediation of traditional party elites (Gerbaudo, 2019). Others have focused on the differences between new parties based on hierarchical patterns of control and centralization mediated through digital infrastructures versus new parties trying to facilitate bottom-up deliberation and decision making through specific digital affordances (Bennett et. alt 2018; Lioy et. alt 2019; Deseriis, 2020; Hartleb, 2021). The paper will also assess how new AI-mediated parties fit with evolutionary theories of parties. This emerging spectrum of new political parties is using artificial intelligence for broad listening, preference aggregation, and even autonomous political decision-making (Novelli and Sandri, 2025). Such new organisations are profoundly reshaping the concept of linkage and representation, with the decision making and participation supplanted by algorithmic responsiveness and human participation reduced to roles of curation and symbolic representation.