The online organization of european political parties

Political parties’ increasing use of digital technologies has become a major research focus (Gerbaudo 2019a; Oross and Tap 2021; Barberà et al. 2021). Yet the ways in which these technologies shape party organization remain a grey area. This article aims to address this gap by proposing a common framework to map party digitalization across different aspects such as online selection of leaders, candidates, and internal bodies. By measuring differences in the digitalization patterns of European parties, particularly with regard to their internal elections, we find that the selection of leaders and candidates is digitalized to a fairly large extent, both in digitally native parties and in mainstream and traditional ones. Furthermore, we find that online voting is hardly used to select members of internal party bodies. This research improves our understanding of the most recent transformations of political parties, allowing for a more precise evaluation of the influence of digital technologies on t democratic linkage.