Business as usual? How gamification transforms internal party democracy

Abstract

This article was motivated by the question whether gamification represents a substantial innovation in internal party democracy, by contributing to change the dynamics of power within parties. To answer this question, we examine the only known case of gamification in the field of internal party voting, launched by the Italian Movimento 5 Stelle. We expected that gamified internal votes would reduce the incumbent advantage and promote party activists. Our data, however, suggest that these decision-making processes follow the same logic as the traditional ones. We thus conclude that digital innovations often end up working as “business as usual”.

Keywords:

• Candidate selection
• gamification
• internal party democracy
• Movimento 5 stelle
• primaries

Notes

1 Gamification is defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding et al. 2011).

2 For sure, games existed long before gamification, and contributed to shaping social behaviours in important ways (Caillois 1958; Huizinga 1955). More specifically, the strategy of collecting badges and points to win awards has long been used in marketing strategies. The digital technologies have taken these to a whole new level. Beyond the examples discussed in this article, social credit systems are being used in some countries to control citizens (Liang et al. 2018).

3 Criticisms also arose from the community of gamers. For them, gamification would have little to do with games. Rather, it would be a form of values’ appropriation by business interests that exploits consumers as well as frustrates the practice of the game, reducing games to a stimulus-response experience (see Bogost 2014).

4 Another tool linked to gamification is Mi Fido (I trust you), a button through which members could trust other members, creating rankings of trust.

5 The party central office is “the national leadership of the party organization which, at least in theory, is organizationally distinct from the party in public office, and which, at the same time, organizes and is usually representative of the party on the ground” (Katz and Mair, 1993: 594).

6 In 2021, M5S broke its ties with Associazione Rousseau. Davide Casaleggio, who was contrary to the institutionalisation of the party, officially left M5S, while the party opted for an external provider for its online decision-making processes. Associazione Rousseau still exists; its main aim is to promote participatory democracy in all political contexts.

7 Call to Action was a tool on the platform that allowed members to create local events.

8 Activism is a sub-section of Crea o partecipa a eventi in which it is possible for members to create a local version of some mobilisation campaigns proposed by the party.

9 These are physical events organised by Associazione Rousseau in some cities.

10 Italy has a proportional electoral law with a 4% national threshold. The country is divided into five macro-areas during the European elections (North-East, North-West, Centre, South, Islands) which elect a specific number of MEPs, based on the population.

11 The electoral law in 2018 was a mixed electoral law with a proportional part (62.5% of the seats) and a plurality part (the remaining seats). The Parlamentarie system selected candidates at the district level only.

12 For this approach, we use the logistf package in R. The replications of the models are available in the Online Appendix. The results are robust across all models. Tables 8A, 9A and 10A replicate the models in Table 1 in the main text, Table 11A, 12A and 13A the models in Table 2, Table 14A, 15A and 16A Figures 4, 5 and 6 in the main text.

13 We do not consider education as a control variable, because the education level is one of the merits we take into consideration in our analyses.