Italian parties and the digital challenge: between limits and opportunities

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how the website has survived the paradigm shift due to the digitization of the political field. A careful review of the literature – which however lacks a systematic diachronic perspective – shows a pattern of functional adaptability of the website to the varying impacts and inputs of digitization variables on the political field. The centrality of the website lies in its becoming a cross-functional hub of a party’s digital activities. The website can no longer be considered merely as a communication channel but should rather be interpreted as an element of a party’s organizational structure. Our research adopts a comparative perspective as it considers the 10 main Italian parties alongside parties selected from among the major advanced democracies of Europe, America, Oceania, Asia and Africa. A total of 119 political parties’ websites have been analysed by means of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). We identified the analytical dimensions most able to explain the current functional nature of the websites. The analysis shows a prevailing tendency of Italian parties to activate functions promoting both online and offline mobilization. As regards the communication function, Italian parties tend to activate the top-down rather than the relational model. The website is still mainly conceived as a broadcast medium rather than as a digital communication hub.

KEYWORDS:

• political communication
• digital politics
• political parties websites
• mobilisation
• engagement

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Appendix 1 contains a complete list of all 129 parties analysed.

2. Source: Election Guide from the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (http://www.electionguide.org).

3. See Appendix 1.

4. Multiple Correspondence Analysis was carried out using the packages FactoMineR of R (method = BURT), based on Husson, Le, and Pagès (2017). Exploratory multivariate analysis by example used R. CRC Press.

5. Additional values related to the active categories of MCA are available in Appendix 2.

6. See Appendix 1 to retrieve the party that corresponds to each number.

7. The analysis is limited to the Democrats’ website because the GOP website is not online.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristopher Cepernich

Cepernich Cristopher is a media and political sociologist at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society at the University of Turin. He is President of the Italian Association of Political Communication and Director of the Master in journalism at the University of Turin. He researches in the field of digital political communication and election campaigns. Among the most recent publications: Political Communication, with G. Mazzoleni, in eds. D. Berg-Schlosser, B. Badie, L. Morlino, “The SAGE Handbook of Political Science” (SAGE, 2020) and Le campagne elettorali al tempo della networked politics (Laterza 2017).

Alice Fubini

Fubini Alice is a PhD student at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. She is a member of the research team of the ERC Starting Grant 2018 funded project BIT-ACT: “Bottom-up Initiatives and Anti-Corruption Technologies: How Citizens Use ICTs to Fight Corruption.” Research interests: digital political communication, hybrid forms of journalism, fake news and disinformation. Publications: Fake news and disinformation online, in «Problemi dell’informazione», 1/2019, pp. 243-250; Fake news: aporie di un concetto debole, in «Comunicazione Politica», 3/2018, pp. 433-438.