The digitalisation of Italian political parties: a formal analysis of party statutes

This article examines the attention paid to digitalisation by Italian political parties. To this end, using an original methodology, we analyse the statutes adopted between 2008 and 2025 by the 11 parties represented in the Italian Parliament elected in 2022. The analysis assesses the extent to which party statutes address digitalisation by examining references to digital practices in three areas: external communication, internal coordination and intra-party democracy. The article is organised as follows. First, we provide a brief overview of the existing literature on party digitalisation. Second, we describe the data and methodology used in the empirical analysis. Third, we present and discuss the findings. Finally, we consider the implications of our results for theories of digital politics. Our analysis enables us to compare the attention paid to digitalisation across Italian parties and to trace how this has changed over time. The evidence shows that the Movimento 5 Stelle and left-wing parties place greater emphasis on digitalisation, whereas right-wing parties devote less attention to it. Moreover, while all parties devote some attention to the use of digital technologies in external communication and internal coordination, only the Partito Democratico and, especially, the Movimento 5 Stelle place significant emphasis in their statutes on the digitalisation of intra-party democracy.