PARTIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE—A REVIEW ARTICLE

This article reviews and profiles the literature on the changes to political parties’ organisation and operation resulting from the rise of the new digital information and communication technologies (ICTs). Its main aim is to offer an understanding of the extent to which the Internet in its dominant forms (i.e. WWW and email), has brought about a shift in the traditional role and relevance of parties in democratic society, according to the growing literature on this topic. Since parties first established a public presence in cyberspace in the mid-1990s by setting up websites, there has been a flurry of speculation and an increasing amount of empirical study of this process of adaptation. In general, these studies can be seen as covering one of three broad areas: (1) the intra-party arena, focusing on how parties are connecting (or not) with their membership using new ICTs to wire up their internal communication mechanisms; (2) the inter-party arena, examining and comparing parties’ online campaigning efforts and, in particular, the implications for minor party competitiveness and external relations with the electorate—does it generate more support? And finally (3) the systemic arena, looking more broadly at how parties’ adaptation to new ICTs will affect their position in the democratic sphere and what new forms or model of party might emerge. In drawing together these studies, therefore, the article aims to address a range of specific questions, such as: whether new ICTs are actually helping parties to recruit and retain members; to what extent the new media are helping newer and smaller parties to compete on a more level communication playing field; and how far voters appear to be responding to their efforts, as well as addressing more general questions about the implications of these developments for party formation in the future. While we make reference to parties from a variety of national contexts, our account draws particularly on our experiences of observing the British parties’ efforts to harness the new media during the course of the past decade. Parties’ ability to sustain themselves financially and organisationally has come under increasing question in recent years as levels of membership have fallen and levels of partisan identification and support in the wider electorate have declined (Dalton and Wattenberg 2002; Mair and van Biezen 2004; Seyd and Whiteley 2004; Heidar and Saglie 2003). While some observers appear to have abandoned all hope that parties can be ‘resuscitated’ (Rawnsley 2006: 25; and see Wilson 2006), others have issued increasingly insistent calls for reform and renewal. Parties, along with legislatures and government bureaucracies, are urged to seek new ways to reconnect with their civic and local roots and revive themselves as agents of democracy for the twenty-first century (Alexander and Creasy 2006; Cruddas and Harris 2007). Among the modernisation options being considered, new ICTs feature increasingly heavily. For instance, a recent report issued by Demos, a leading British think-tank, called for