Abstract
On 8 September 2007 Beppe Grillo, a well-known Italian comedian with a popular blog, organized the first ‘Vaffa-Day’ demonstration in Bologna. 1 Thousands came to protest against the Italian political elite and Grillo subsequently built a political movement through his blog, demonstrations and on-line platforms such as Meet Up. In 2009 he founded the Five Star Movement, a political party that campaigns against corrupt Italian politicians, and advocates for more transparent, direct democracy. 2 The party has been outstandingly popular: in 2013 they won more than 20% in national elections, and in 2018 they won 32%, making it the largest party in the Italian parliament. Their political leader, Luigi di Maio, formed a coalition government and became Deputy Prime Minister.
The Five Star Movement is one of the most successful examples of a new type of political organization: the ‘digital’ party. It stands out amongst other digital parties – Podemos (Spain), various Pirate Parties in Europe and La France Insoumise (France) – as one of the few to hold executive power. Paolo Gerbaudo’s book explores the rise and distinct nature of these digital parties and asks: to what extent are digital parties more democratic than their predecessors? This is an important question, given the increasing use of social media and digital platforms by all political parties.
A core contribution of Gerbaudo’s book is to outline the distinct nature of digital parties. These are parties which ‘profess to be more open to ordinary people, more immediate and more direct, more authentic and more transparent’ (p. 4). They also promise to deliver a new ‘politics supported by digital technology’. The digital party is based on the same data-driven logic of social networks: they are ‘data hungry’ and constantly seek to expand their stock of contacts, to increase their power (p. 5). They lower the costs of entry by offering free membership – just as Google, Facebook and Amazon do. They feed off member-engagement through on-line platforms, rather than organizing their members through traditional party structures with physical headquarters, and regular in-person meetings. In fact, Gerbaudo suggests that the digital party is the ‘translation of the business model and organizational innovation of digital corporations to the political arena’ (p. 6).
Digital parties are not only using digital platforms to communicate, but claim to offer a more democratic way of doing politics by handing over power to their members. They emerged as a response to ‘TV parties’ such as Forza Italia (Italy), and Blair’s Labour Party (UK), which were based on TV marketing and spin-doctoring, but had little need for members (although there was a remarkable drop in UK Labour Party membership during the Blair years). Digital parties are based on ‘Participationism’: the belief that ‘participation, rather than representation’ is the core source of political legitimacy in democracies (p. 81). Their members are educated, young, hyper-connected and hyper-excluded.
Digital parties have transformed the internal decision-making process of political parties, getting rid of party cadres (or middlemen) in favour of digital platforms. These platforms include: Loomio (developed in New Zealand during #Occupy), Rousseau (developed for the Five Star Movement), Nationbuilder (developed in the US and used initially by France Insoumise), Consul (Podemos) and Liquidfeedback (Pirate Parties). They use these digital platforms to constantly chart ‘the shifting opinion of their members, with the ultimate aim of adapting to their evolving tendencies’ (p. 74). Gerbaudo’s book offers compelling examples of how this works in practice. He has interviewed 30 members of digital political parties, and he traces how digital parties have used digital platforms to seek member input.
However, Gerbaudo does not drink the ‘Kool-aid’ peddled by these organizations. While digital parties claim to harness the spontaneous and authentic deliberation of their members, they do not deliver on this. There are a myriad of problems Gerbaudo identifies: members do not equally participate in on-line deliberations, but rather we see a tyranny of ‘people with time’ whose voices dominate. Digital parties have become so focused on the process of participation, that they care less about the substance of their politics. Furthermore, the digital platforms they have designed are not neutral, but come with their own biases. Some tend to favour deliberation (such as Loomio), whereas others are better purposed for simple yes/no referenda (Rousseau). Gerbaudo illustrates that Podemos and the Five Star Movement use their on-line platforms most frequently for referenda, rather than deliberation.
Most critically, Gerbaudo argues that all the digital parties have a charismatic ‘hyperleader’ who runs a top-down political party and uses referenda manipulatively to endorse their own position. Leaders such as Luigi di Maio of the Five Star Movement, or Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, will decide the timing and phrasing of a referendum question in order to garner majority support. Party leaders may also try to directly influence members’ votes. As one interviewee explains: ‘it was enough for Grillo to say A and the members would vote A’ (p. 141). The result is resounding internal support for the leaders’ desired outcome. Most of the referenda Gerbaudo examines deliver more than a 65% majority in favour, and many go above 90%. In fact, there are only two occasions when Five Star Movement members have rebelled and rejected the preferred outcome of the leadership. Thus the book suggests that digital parties can become democratic façades for demagogic leaders. However Gerbaudo also notes that a majority of members have become increasingly disillusioned with the process and stopped voting on-line. The leaders of digital parties may trigger their own demise through their manipulative use of referenda.
Gerbaudo’s book is a critical contribution to the literature on new forms of organizations in the digital era. He connects these digital parties with the rise of ‘platform firms’, such as Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb and Google (Rahman and Thelen, 2019), which also claim a unique, ‘unmediated’ and direct relationship with their users through the smartphones they carry around all day. Gerbaudo also points out how digital parties have emulated the light-bureaucratic form and digital engagement practices of ‘netroots’ advocacy organizations, such as MoveOn, which has no permanent headquarters, and staff work remotely across the United States. Digital advocacy organizations regularly survey their members, test campaigns and collect analytic data on members’ preferences which determines their campaign decision-making, just as digital parties now do (Hall, 2019; Karpf, 2016). Gerbaudo notes the close linkages between digital parties and digital advocacy organizations and I too have witnessed Bernie Sanders’ campaigners, Becky Bond and Zack Exeley, sharing lessons they have learned with a global network of digital advocacy organizations.
However, there are several shortcomings to the book. Firstly, the book is focused almost exclusively on a very small number of ‘progressive’ political parties in Western Europe. It does not discuss how political parties in Asia, Africa or Latin America have used digital technologies to campaign and engage their members in innovative ways. Yet Narendra Modi pioneered the use of holograms in the 2014 Indian election and more recently political leaders in Brazil, India and Kenya have developed sophisticated campaigns based on social media and WhatsApp (Findlay et al., 2019; Nyabola, 2018). Neither does the book explore whether mainstream political parties, or the far right, are emulating digital parties’ practices (Schradie, 2019). We know that the US Democratic Party shifted away from labour and capital intensive campaigns to tech-intensive well before the Republican Party (Kreiss, 2016); and that Trump’s use of social media was pivotal in his electoral victory. The book would have benefitted from painting a broader picture of global trends in political parties and election campaigns.
Furthermore, the book glosses over the underlying political ideologies of these parties and substantive differences between them. Several of the cases Gerbaudo focuses on are political parties (the Five Star Movement, the Pirate Parties, Podemos), while others mentioned are factions of political parties (e.g. Jeremy Corbyn’s Momentum) or political campaigns (Bernie Sanders). Europe’s Pirate Parties have a deep commitment to internet freedom and copyright reform, which members of the other digital parties may not share. The book offers a narrow definition of the ‘digital party’ – they are all on the left, support a Universal Basic Income, and grassroots, direct, deliberative democracy. Yet the rise of far right parties and their adept use of social media suggest there may be other forms of digital party.
The book’s most glaring omission is that it does not discuss the successes or failures of these digital parties, and thus may date quickly. It would have been fascinating to read a book which examined whether digital parties’ success related to their digital form. The Pirate Party is no longer a particularly strong force in Europe, and has been eclipsed by far right political parties (such as the Alternativ fur Deutschland) and by the Greens in recent European elections. In the 2019 Spanish general elections, Podemos lost 6.9% of their votes, equivalent to 29 seats, and now have 14.3%. La France Insoumise, a democratic socialist party launched by Jean-Luc Mélanchon in 2016, came in fourth in the 2017 French Presidential campaign, and has been eclipsed by Macron.
Meanwhile, the Five Star Movement has suffered devastating defeats in the past year. In 2018 they formed a governing coalition across a significant ideological divide with Matteo Salvini’s far right La Lega, which was the second largest party with 17% of the vote. Salvini and di Maio both became Deputy Prime Ministers but Salvini is effectively running the government and widely seen as the real leader of Italy. Salvini’s popularity was confirmed in the European elections in May 2019: La Lega won 34%, doubling their vote when compared with the national election, and the Five Star Movement almost halved theirs with 17%. The reversal in fortune is important, given the Five Star Movement is one of the few cases of a digital party taking power.
Furthermore, Salvini is a savvy, and frequent user of Facebook and Twitter. He also uses an algorithm, commonly referred to as the ‘Beast’, which allows him to identify best-performing posts, polarize political debate around his positions, and trigger negative emotions which are most likely to get public attention (Martini, 2018). La Lega is not a ‘digital party’ according to Gerbaudo’s strict definition. However, a fascinating extension of this book would analyse how parties on the right and the left have used digital technologies to win elections, and engage their members genuinely, or manipulatively, in public debate.