ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that, by virtue of the Internet’s distinctive characteristics, parties’ engagement with it carries the potential for an enhancement of the quality of democracy. Whether that potential is, or is likely to be, realised in the future is something that depends on the choices of parties themselves – where such choices will in turn be a function of their strategic implications given the systemic and cultural contexts within which the parties find themselves. This being the case, it would seem highly unlikely that what has so far been discovered about the impact of the net on parties and party competition in some democracies will be found to be replicated in exactly the same form in all democracies. For example, we might reasonably expect (though a case could also be made for the opposite view) that in party systems that are highly competitive in the Sartorian (1976) sense, parties will be more active in exploiting the technology in an attempt to enhance citizen political involvement than are parties in less competitive systems where, by definition, victories are on larger margins and the distribution of the strength among parties is uneven. Somewhat more straightforwardly, we might reasonably expect that in systems where the proportion of ordinary citizens online is higher, parties would be more active in exploiting the technology for campaigning than in systems where the proportion is lower. This, then, is our point of departure: while much has been written about the advent of the Internet for the quality of democracy, we need to examine polities whose party system and other characteristics differ from those of the democracies – mainly America and the northern European polities – that have hitherto been used to explore the political implications of the net. Only then will we avoid the potential trap of technological determinism. Only then will we move closer to a fuller understanding of the conditions under which the net may have an impact upon political parties in a broader sense.
