Common Good or Good for Commodities? Parties’ Discourse on Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. The Digaipo+ Database

This paper examines how political parties discursively position digitalisation and artificial intelligence (AI), and under which conditions these positions align either with commodifying views of the digital, centred on the private enclosure of knowledge, data, and communication infrastructures, or with commonifying orientations that foreground de-commodification as a political objective. Rather than treating ‘digital politics’ as a coherent or self-standing ideological field, the paper analyses parties’ discourse as embedded within broader political projects and competitive contexts. The analysis is grounded in DigAIpo+, a novel database designed to systematically capture how parties articulate digitalisation and AI in their programmatic discourse. The database contains 38,356 quasi-sentences extracted from party manifestos included in the Comparative Manifesto Project database (Lehmann et al., 2025). Manifestos were translated into English and segmented at the sentence and contextual levels using the ManifestoBERTa models. Building on literature focusing on digitalisation as a discursive and ideological object (e.g. König 2018, Guglielmo 2025) each quasi-sentence was coded through a mixed human and machine-learning strategy along eight variables: the digital topic (e.g. data governance, artificial intelligence, platforms, cybersecurity); the political domain (e.g. economy, public administration, democracy, welfare); the technological domain; the type of statement (position versus valence); orientation (status quo versus proposal); degree of agreement; issue centrality; and contextual centrality in surrounding paragraphs. This structure allows the analysis to capture multiple dimensions of mentions of digitalisation, including positioning, issue salience, and whether digitalisation is referred to as technocratic, as instruments for efficiency-oriented governance, or as elements reshaping core political domains. On the basis of these variables, the paper constructs an index of digital commodification versus digital commoning, which serves as the outcome for a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The QCA identifies combinations of conditions associated with each discursive orientation. Four conditions are examined: parties’ ideological orientation beyond digital issues; leadership outsiderness and intra-party democracy; the configuration of party competition; and national levels of technological development, operationalised through DESI indicators. While the analysis is ongoing, three expectations guide the study. First, most parties are expected to articulate commodifying discourses, framing digitalisation primarily as a means to enhance economic competitiveness and administrative efficiency. Second, explicitly commonifying orientations are expected to be comparatively rare in party manifestos. Third, commonifying positions (and relevance thereof) are expected to emerge under specific combinations of left-leaning ideological positioning, outsider leadership in competitive party systems, and high levels of national technological change. By combining a new dataset with comparative analysis, the paper contributes empirically and methodologically to research on party competition and digital politics.