Party Organization Meets Digitalization: Intra-Party Configurations and Digital Developments in Western Political Parties

Does intra-party democracy foster party digitalization? While digital technologies are increasingly recognized as central to contemporary party organization, the relationship between internal democratic structures and digital development remains underexplored. This represents a recent and emerging area of inquiry, with existing studies having primarily focused on party-level characteristics such as size and ideological orientation, finding that larger parties and left-wing parties tend to exhibit higher levels of digital adoption (Gerbaudo, 2019; Kersting et al., 2020). However, the role of organizational configurations—particularly the structure of intra-party democracy—in shaping digitalization trajectories has received limited systematic attention. This paper addresses this gap by examining whether and how different forms of intra-party democracy (IPD) are associated with varying levels of party digitalization across Western democracies. Our analysis distinguishes between two ideal-typical forms of intra-party democracy: assembly-based democracy, characterized by deliberative processes and collective decision-making through party congresses and intermediate bodies, and plebiscitary democracy, characterized by direct member participation through referendums and online consultations that bypass intermediary structures. We further incorporate leadership centralization as a key organizational dimension that may interact with democratic structures to shape digitalization trajectories. This typological approach allows us to move beyond both party size and ideology and binary classifications of democratic versus non-democratic parties to examine how specific institutional configurations relate to technological adoption. Methodologically, the paper makes an innovative contribution by combining two major cross-national datasets: the Political Party Database (PPDB), which provides comprehensive data on party organizational structures and internal democratic procedures, and the DIGIPART dataset, which systematically measures party digitalization across multiple dimensions including digital infrastructure, online participation platforms, and digital communication practices. This integrated dataset enables systematic comparative analysis of the organizational determinants of party digitalization across a substantial number of parties and countries, providing unprecedented empirical leverage on questions of organizational change in the digital age.