Hack the Party! Digital Transformation of Political Parties in Iceland and Spain

Abstract

This dissertation examines the digital transformation of political party organizations in Europe and will be discussing the ways in which political parties face different challenges and opportunities when adopting digital infrastructures. Digital intra-party platforms have the potential to democratize party organizations in many ways, and this dissertation seeks to understand how and to what extent this is true. While some technologies like social media are easy to adopt, others, such as participatory platforms, may require structural adjustments in the organizational design. I aim to identify different types of digital adaptation strategies by developing a theory that accounts for the role of organizational design. The empirical research compares two new parties, the Icelandic Pirate Party and Barcelona En Comu. It maps their political trajectory between 2008 to 2016, as well as their shared approach to organizational innovations. For the mixed-method research design, I collected data from formal interviews, party documents, social media posts, and used NVivo to analyze digital party functions thematically. 

My argument is that integrating open-source crowdsourcing platforms in internal decision-making yields an organizational model that analytically differs from the existing party types. Hence, I discuss these innovations' generalizability by juxtaposing the established parties' digital transformation strategies. Finally, the dissertation ends with a reflection on the systemic impacts of these contrasting strategies on the sustainability of electoral democracies in Europe by arguing that if participatory trends continue among the smaller parties, a new cleavage based on organizational openness will permeate through the European electoral arena. 

This study expands our empirical understanding of party functions in the digital environment and informs our theoretical knowledge of the relationship between technology and party adaptation. I do so to help academics and technologists understand the nuances and organizational dilemmas that arise from various design and technology decisions underlying digital transformation strategies. To that aim, this dissertation provides a common design vocabulary and conceptual framework on systems theory for the collaboration between party staff, coders, system engineers, and social scientists.