Digital rank-and-file: party activists’ perceptions and use of the Internet

Political parties are in a phase of transition in advanced industrial democracy. A declining, socially restricted membership, decreasing levels of activism, and a shift towards more individualistic modes of political engagement threaten the secular role the party have played in modern democracy. The development of the Internet in a period of organisational change for parties has meant that it quickly became intertwined with debates about reviving representative political organisations. New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), including the Internet, in fact provide novel and important opportunities and challenges to political parties. Existing research has focused on the use of ICTs as tranformational of electoral campaigns, on the structure and functions of national and federal party sites, and on the impact of ICTs on the internal structure and decision-making of the parties. Much less attention has been devoted to intra-party dynamics, the rank-and-file, and how the introduction of ICTs has altered the relation between party activists, on the one hand, and party elites, ordinary members and the wider public on the other. Yet party activists constitute the life and blood of party organisation, both in (increasingly frequent) times of elections, and between elections. A change in the way party activists communicate and organise politically, primed by the use of ICTs, might help or hinder the re-structuration of parties in turbulent times. Using data from an online survey of party activists in the UK (N = 4770), this paper asks questions about the perception and use of ICTs by party activist, ICTs potential for participation and engagement of rank-and-file, the penetration of the Internet in pre-exiting political careers and patterns of organisational behaviour. Generally, and most importantly, the paper asks which role ICTs are playing in the re-structuration of political parties, seen from the privileged perspective of the insiders.