Going Digital … But What For? Parties' Ideological Positions and Divides on Platform Societies in Western Europe

Abstract

The digital transition has become a crucial area of ideological contestation, as ongoing debates on digital surveillance and data commodification exemplify. Yet, we know too little about how political parties tap into these confrontations. This article elaborates a critical approach to map the ideological positions that 25 parties in France, Germany, Italy and Spain adopt on platform societies. The empirical analysis classifies parties' positions to uncover how their views on the digital economy and digital politics reshape their core ideologies. While parties are distributed along six ideological positions, most cases populate three types: Platform Neoliberalism, Social Liberalism 4.0 and Platform Socialism. These types represent the tripartite ideological divide on platform societies. Ultimately, this study provides an empirically informed theory of comparative digital politics and the foundation for research agendas on political parties' views on digitalization and the relations between ideologies, public policy and parties' organizational change in the digital age.

It is clear that we are in the midst of a digital transition, but political studies lack consistent frameworks to make sense of the shapes of political contestation on platform societies. In a nutshell: we know we are ‘going digital … but what for?’ This article addresses this gap through a comparative study of a sample of Western European parties' ideological positions and divides on platform societies.

The research takes a big-tent approach, conceiving the digital transition as the processes impacting industrial production (Arntz et al. 2017), public services (Welch 2021), the media (Chadwick 2017), and political organizations (Barberà et al. 2021; Earl et al. 2015), shaping the shift from post-industrial to platform societies, in which ‘social and economic traffic is increasingly channelled by an (overwhelmingly corporate) global online platform ecosystem’ (Van Dijck et al. 2018: 14).

Critical scholars have already theorized that the transition to platform societies is creating a peculiar terrain of ideological contestation. Views celebrating the commodification of data for profit maximization are counterposed to alternatives advocating the cooperative production of value through the digital commons (Dencik et al. 2022). Further, we know that the digital transition underpins emerging tensions between the libertarian promises of platform economies and the practices of surveillance by big tech companies and state apparatuses (Houser and Voss 2018). These tensions indicate that political contestation on platform societies rarely stands alone. Instead, it cuts across broader views on economic, political and cultural relations. This is why this article, rather than looking at the digital, per se, analyses how views on digitalization reshape parties' core ideologies. This approach is consistent with the first studies in the field, which identified that parties ‘have specific policy motives that arise from their programmatic basic orientation and they have an interest in maintaining ideological … consistency’ when elaborating their views on digital issues (König 2018: 406).

While recent literature on digitalization and party politics has primarily investigated how parties use platforms for organizational reform (Gibson et al. 2017; Lioy et al. 2019) or campaigning (Bennett et al. 2018; Vaccari 2014), questions regarding what party elites think about platform societies, what ideas define parties' positions and how these ideas reshape parties' core ideologies are rarely asked.

The article proceeds in three steps to answer these questions. First, it develops a critical approach to the study of parties' ideological positions on digital economy and digital politics. Following Teun van Dijk (2000), ideologies are conceptualized as the assumptions shaping how political groups ‘organise the multitude of social beliefs about what is the case, good or bad, right or wrong’ (van Dijk 2000: 8).

Second, through an empirical study of 25 parties' manifestos in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the article elaborates a typology of parties' ideological positions, with cases distributed along six types, conceptualized as: Platform Neoliberalism; Lib Dem 4.0; Social Liberalism 4.0; Post Social Democracy; Techno-Statist Socialism; Platform Socialism. For each type, in-depth qualitative analysis identifies a core theme which illuminates the specific functions that ideas on the digital are playing to reshape parties' core ideologies.

Third, the article develops a theory of the main ideological divides on platform societies, which sees parties mostly distributed along three positions: Platform Neoliberalism, Social Liberalism 4.0 and Platform Socialism. The discussion section analyses how these polarities represent the main approaches to digitalization in Western European politics. The conclusions indicate how this theorization represents the foundation for three research agendas: (1) parties' discourses on the digital beyond the sample, (2) how parties' ideas relate to their performances in policymaking on digital issues, and (3) how parties' ideas inform organizational digitalization.

A critical approach to parties' positions on platform societies

The proposed critical approach to parties' ideological positions and divides on platform societies results from combining the conceptualizations induced from previous empirical research on parties' manifestos (Guglielmo 2022) and two bodies of literature. First, critical digital studies have identified key ideological tensions underlying the transition to platform societies through different forms of resistance to datafication in the economic realm (Jordan 2020; Srnicek 2016) and dataism/dataveillance in the political sphere (Smith 2017; Van Dijck et al. 2018). However, this literature does not address how parties tap into these forms of contestation.

Second, a series of seminal articles by Pascal König and colleagues (König 2018, 2019; König and Wenzelburger 2019) identified the increasing salience of digital issues in parties' manifestos during the 2010s. These authors start from unstructured observations of parties' claims to inductively theorize how parties have increasingly adopted clear stances on digital economic and sociopolitical issues (König 2018: 418). Further, this increased salience stems from spill-over effects related to party contestation over core policy fields such as economic growth and more efficient public services (König and Wenzelburger 2019: 1684–1685). Crucially, during the 2010s, parties increasingly diverged over how to tackle the tension between the digital as a fuel of economic growth and the risks of invasion of privacy and liberty (König 2019). However, these studies overlook how parties' positions on the digital feed back into their core ideologies.

On these grounds, the approach of this article seeks to map parties' positions on two main domains: digital economy and digital politics. This is consistent with evidence that since the transition from industrial to post-industrial societies, parties' ideological divides have been articulated along two relatively independent axes: economic and political/cultural (see Ford and Jennings 2020; Inglehart 1990). The first stems from class relations, historically reflected in the distribution of political parties along the left–right axis. The second concerns the power relations between individuals, marginalized groups and political authorities and is represented by libertarian/authoritarian divides (Hooghe et al. 2002).

My proposed approach is critical, as it considers social cleavages historically shaped by the structural inequalities ingrained in capitalist and patriarchal societal formations (Gramsci 1971; Young 1990). Drawing on Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams's (2022) theorization of hegemony, the article understands the digital transition as led by an alliance of big tech entrepreneurs and a neoliberal political class seeking to protect their core interests. On this ground, I aim to map parties' positions based on the extent to which they aim at transforming, moderately reforming or conserving the current hegemony of platform societies.

Digital economy: Datafication and resistance

Amidst the booming of the commercial internet in the 1990s, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996) theorized the ‘Californian ideology’ as a milestone in the promotion of the digital economy. The Californian ideology was the peculiar mix of hyper-capitalism and libertarianism promoted by tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, a creed which ‘promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippie and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies’ (Barbrook and Cameron 1996: 45). Underlying this view was the creed that the digital economy had a twofold liberatory potential: the digital could unleash the creativity of free-spirited entrepreneurs inventing profitable digital solutions while disintermediating social relations, therefore reducing the room for manoeuvre of state authorities. As these ideas travelled to the age of platforms 4.0 in the late 2010s, new tensions emerged, with the anti-statist faith in digitalization increasingly under strain as the states utilized platforms to police citizens and dissent (Owen 2015).

Against the background of this emerging tension, datafication – turning pieces of information into digital commodities – has been reconfiguring the relations of production into what Nick Srnicek has theorized as ‘platform capitalism’. Indeed, digital data have ‘come to serve a number of key capitalist functions: they educate and give a competitive advantage to algorithms; they enable the coordination and outsourcing of workers’ (Srnicek 2016: 23). Moreover, datafication has further exacerbated the exploitation of digital labourers, by dividing the workforce between precarious gig workers (e.g. Uber drivers and the like) and a quasi-elite: the coders and digital designers of the leading big tech companies (Arvidsson 2019; Jarrett 2022).

The approach developed here aims to uncover the extent to which parties seek to reproduce, moderately reform or transform this configuration of the digital economy. As such, I expect that political actors seeking to protect the reproduction of platform capitalism promote ideas celebrating datafication, opposing the resistance of platform workers and protecting capitalist control over digital infrastructures.

On the contrary, I deduce from critical digital studies that parties seeking to transform the digital economy will take positions on three main issues of contestation. First, the movement for peer-to-peer production (Bauwens et al. 2019) prefigures an alternative to datafication around the ideology of the digital commons. The commons refer to goods and services whose access cannot be enclosed for the appropriation of value (Kioupkiolis 2021). Second, there are views of platform workers as the emerging class generating new forms of resistance to big platforms (Cant 2020). These range from disruptive practices on work sites to the promotion of alternative forms of labourer-driven digital platforms (Haidar and Keune 2021). Third, these alternatives are linked to a set of digital anti-capitalist views centred on the alternative usage of platforms to reappropriate the infrastructures along which digital data flow (Jordan 2015).

The consistency of this deductive approach is tested against the author's previous research¹ and inductive studies, which show that parties are increasingly proposing ideas around digital infrastructures, open-source software and working conditions (König 2018: 409). Accordingly, the digital commons, the liberation of platform workers and the advance of digital anti-capitalist critiques are the building blocks of the first core concept for my empirical analysis concerning the extent to which parties sustain a ‘transformative digital economy’, defined as follows:

1. (1) The digital transition is a potential driver of paradigmatic shifts in the relations of production, including labour/capital and human/nature relations. Digital platforms are boosters/facilitators of broader processes to advance the digital commons, the emancipation of platform workers and the promotion of digital anti-capitalist views (Fuchs 2021; Jordan 2020).

Digital politics: Dataism and its opponents

The assumptions underlying datafication have also permeated the ideological approaches to digital politics, with political actors espousing views about digital platforms' extraordinary potential to elevate public services' efficiency while reducing costs (Kuntsman and Miyake 2022). This growing emphasis on digitalizing government has been underpinned by what Jose van Dijck (2014: 198) theorizes as the ideology of dataism: the ‘widespread belief in the objective quantification and potential tracking of all kinds of human behavior and sociality through online media technologies’.

Dataism underlies most of the discourses on the possibilities of e-government, and the optimization of the managerial control of public expenditure (Liu 2022). However, critical scholars have also highlighted the dark side of dataism in the possibility of ‘dataveillance’. This involves the ‘monitoring of citizens on the basis of their online data’ (Van Dijck 2014: 205), which pushes the prospects of surveillance in new directions (Andrejevic 2012: 96). Dataveillance, however, has also created tensions across liberal democracies, as with the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Hinds et al. 2020), indicating the risk that digital spaces enable foreign intrusions into national political spheres. These events incentivize political actors to elaborate new ideas on the role public authorities can assume in governing the digital transition around cybersecurity, digital literacy, privacy and data protection, as shown by existing literature on parties' positions (König 2018: 408).

As with the digital economy, the proposed approach deduces from literature that parties seeking to conserve the current hegemony of digital politics will support dataism, promote market-oriented views of e-governments and espouse light-touch regulatory views on online privacy protection. On the contrary, political actors seeking to transform digital politics are expected to advance three main areas of contestation. The first concerns platform democracy and celebrates digital platforms as tools to radically reform democracies with a shift from representation to participation (Gerbaudo 2018: 38). The second relates to digital emancipation (Phan and Wark 2021), which concerns the resistance of disenfranchised groups, primarily women and ethnic minorities against online violence and dataveillance (Jarrett 2015): this concept captures the politicization of the digital transition at the nexus of political and cultural antagonisms shaping political divides in Western Europe (Ford and Jennings 2020). Finally, social movements have developed claims around platforms as bearers of digital empowerment for disenfranchised groups. For instance, platforms can be used to reinforce marginalized groups through increased digital literacy (Thornham 2018).

Accordingly, I conceptualize the front of resistance to dataism as aiming at advancing platform democracy, digital emancipation and the digital empowerment of disenfranchised groups. These are the building blocks of the second core concept, which assesses the extent to which parties support a ‘transformative digital politics’, defined as follows:

1. (2) The digital transition is a potential driver of paradigmatic shifts to a radical democratic organization of political relations. Digital platforms are boosters/facilitators of platform democracy, the digital emancipation and the empowerment of disenfranchised groups (Castells 2015; Thornham 2018).

Parties' ideological positions and divides on platform societies: Research design and methodology

In this section I detail how I have operationalized the theoretical approach described above to examine what ideas define parties' positions on the digital economy and digital politics and how their views on the digital reshape their political ideologies.

Case selection

To identify a suitable sample for the analysis, I followed the logic of ‘diverse case selection’, which has ‘as its primary objective the achievement of maximum variance’ among cases (Gerring 2016: 97) in a twofold way. First, as the goal of this qualitative study is theory development, I aimed to select a purposive sample of parties in Western Europe for which literature and preliminary research indicated increased salience and diverse positioning on digital-related issues. Studies by König (2019) and König and Wenzelburger (2019) have focused, among others, on the four major countries in Western Europe: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. These countries account for a majority of the Western European population, gross domestic product and shares of votes in the European Union Council (Eurostat 2023).

While rendering feasible the manual coding inspiring this research required a medium-N sample, I tested the extent to which the four countries are representative of the core ideological positions of all national parties in Western Europe. Accordingly, I mapped the ideological distribution of parties in the sample and the EU-15 countries through the Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2019 (Jolly et al. 2022). As my approach seeks to analyse parties' positioning on two axes of interest, concerning economic and political-cultural relations, I performed this test by looking at parties' distribution on the left–right economic (lrecon) and the Green-Alternative-Libertarian/Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist (GAL–TAN) dimensions. For both the proposed sample and the whole EU-15, I focused on parties gaining representation in the national parliaments. This left me with 109 cases in the EU-15 and 24 out of 25 for which the survey collected data in the four selected countries. I found a strong correspondence between the averages on the two axes: this is 4.6 (EU-15) and 4.8 (four countries) on the lrecon axis, 4.4 (EU-15) and 4.8 (four countries) on the GAL–TAN axis (Figure 1).² The standard deviation indicates similar trends with 2.4 (EU-15) and 2.6 (four countries). Next, I measured the Pearson correlation between the two axes, scoring 0.62 for the EU-15 and 0.77 for the four countries (full data in the Appendix in the Supplementary Material). While these observations indicate that the case selection fits this article's aim to observe how ideas on the digital reshape core ideologies in Western Europe, a necessary caveat is that this big-tent approach may overlook specific ideological combinations in subregions. For instance, the social democratic parties in Denmark and Sweden are cases combining left-wing economic and relatively traditionalist positions on the GAL–TAN axis. These positions may reflect peculiar characteristics of ideological divides in Northern Europe over their social protection models (Nilsson et al. 2020)s and specific research may be necessary to analyse how these stances relate to issues surrounding digitalization.

Figure 1. Parties' Positions on Left–Right Economic (lrecon) and GAL–TAN Axes.

Top: EU-15 countries (N = 109). Bottom: France, Germany, Italy, Spain (N = 24).

Source: Author's elaboration on Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2019.

Second, I tested whether the sample captures diversity in technological development at the country level. For this purpose, I surveyed the latest available scores of the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) (EU Commission 2022), measuring the digital human capital, connectivity, integration of digital technology and digital public services for each EU country. The four selected countries include Western European cases scoring less than the EU-15 average (with Italy scoring 49.25% vs 51.27%), substantially above the average (with Spain scoring 60.78%) and slightly above the average (with France and Germany scoring 53.32% and 52.88%, respectively). While this research focuses on developing a theory of parties' ideological positions, an impressionistic look at the socioeconomic structural conditions concerning digitalization is relevant for future research agendas on the relations between ideologies and policymaking.

Having selected the sample, I accessed from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) (Volkens et al. 2018) or parties' websites when not available on the CMP database, the manifestos of all national parties gaining parliamentary representation in the latest round of general elections (Political Data Yearbook 2022; N = 25, Table 1).

Table 1. List of Cases: 25 Parties in Four Western European Countries

Set-theoretic methods to classify ideological positions

Set theories provide case-oriented techniques to identify the range of combinations of conditions corresponding to property spaces (Lazarsfeld 1937).

In social sciences, set-theoretic methods are most commonly used within qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). While this approach is qualitative because the levels of memberships in sets depends on which distinctions are considered qualitatively relevant, set-theoretic methods can be applied both to quantitative and qualitative data sources (Schneider and Wagemann 2012). In both cases, data must be calibrated, through assigning numerical values corresponding to levels of memberships into sets.

The typology developed here results from adapting the ‘anchored calibration of qualitative data’ method by Nicolas Legewie (2018),³ based on the following steps and tasks:

1. (1) Constructing a calibration framework

   1. (a) Formulating concepts trees

   2. (b) Determining relevant variations and characteristics

2. (2) Applying the calibration framework to the data

   1. (a) Defining data anchors

   2. (b) Sorting data pieces

3. (3) Assigning fuzzy memberships

   1. (a) Scoring cases on indicator-level dimensions

   2. (b) Defining rules of aggregation.

The resulting classification is based on the researcher's qualitative interpretation. However, this spatial visualization of qualitative data analysis facilitates the development of indicators for quantitative content analysis on large datasets. Further, this methodology maximizes the transparency and trustworthiness of qualitative research (Mason 2017). Finally, the publication of the data analysis and validation through an inter-coder reliability test provides ground for replicating the procedures adopted in this research.⁴

Constructing a calibration framework

The first step concerns defining the sets/concepts within which the cases will be scored and the attributes of relevant changes in parties' ideological positions.

The concept tree (task 1.a) is plotted in Figure 2 and stems from the critical approach specified above: the core concepts/main axes, transformative digital economy and transformative digital politics result from sets of indicators whose definitions are detailed in Table 2.

Figure 2. Critical Analytical Framework: Concepts' Tree.

Table 2. Analytical Framework: Core Concepts and Indicators

For each indicator-level concept, the relevant variations which define the scoring of cases are deduced from literature (task 1.b). I have adopted a six-value fuzzy-set scale, ranging from 0 (fully out) to 1 (fully in) to define each value's main characteristic (see Appendix). To give one example, concerning indicator 1.3, Digital Anti-Capitalism, the defining characteristic of the score 0 is that ‘Big tech companies are the benchmark for positive innovation, which also defines further commodification of public powers and institutions’ (see Fuchs 2019: 64–67). The full membership in the set (score 1) is defined by claims depicting ‘Platform capitalism as a primary battlefield for advancing radical alternatives in the relations of production. Discourses on big-tech companies fuel anti-capitalist narratives’ (see Jarrett 2022: 123–124).

Applying the calibration framework to the data

The second step concerned coding data from parties' manifestos in NVivo. For each manifesto, I coded paragraphs making substantial references to digital platforms, digitalization, digital innovation, digital transition or industry 4.0 by scoring them into the corresponding values (N = 1,141 paragraphs). With task 2.a, I identified as ‘data anchors’ the paragraphs representing the best approximation to the defining characteristic of each score. As an illustrative example of the aforementioned indicator Digital Anti-Capitalism, I identified as a data anchor for the value 0 the paragraph by the German Liberal Democratic Party claiming that ‘we want to designate certain regions as digital freedom zones. There should be fewer regulations, tax incentives for research, better financing options for start-ups and less bureaucracy.’ The data anchor for score 1 in this indicator was an extract from the manifesto of the French Communist Party stating that ‘the obsession with capitalist profitability by multinational companies including platform capitalists leads to the cynical exploitation of precarious workers and increases disemployment’.

Next (task 2.b), all the paragraphs were manually scored based on the researcher's interpretation of their similarity to the data anchor. To follow the example on the indicator Digital Anti-Capitalism, I coded as scoring 1 the paragraph of The Left (Germany) stating that ‘Digitalization can open opportunities for self-determined work and life projects. To achieve this goal, we must change the current digital strategy of the federal government.’

Assigning fuzzy memberships

After sorting paragraphs into the sets, I scored the cases on indicator-level dimensions (task 3.a). To do so, I calculated the weighted average of the paragraphs for each score within each indicator. Following the example above on the German Liberal Democratic Party, in the indicator Digital Anti-Capitalism, 20 paragraphs were coded as 0 and 3 as 0.2, resulting in a weighted average of 0.06 (see Appendix). Next, I defined the rules of aggregation to calculate the parties' position on the core concepts/axes (Oana et al. 2021). The German Liberal Democratic Party scored 0.07 on the axis Transformative Digital Economy, resulting from the maximum of the minimal values between pairs of indicators. Indeed:

Digital Commons (0.08) AND Platform Workers (0.07) = 0.07 >

Digital Commons (0.08) AND Digital Anti-Capitalism (0.03) = 0.03

OR

Platform Workers (0.07) AND Digital Anti-Capitalism (0.03) = 0.03

Finally (task 3.b), parties' typologies were developed on the basis of a theoretically informed choice of which variations are considered qualitatively relevant. Accordingly, I have identified two thresholds splitting the Transformative Digital Economy and Transformative Digital Politics axes into three ranges of values. This tripartite distinction is theory-driven: it separates cases based on whether their positions seek to reproduce, moderately reform or radically transform digital economy and digital politics. Accordingly, cases are out of the sets, and therefore falling into neoliberal and/or authoritarian positions when their scores are ≤ 0.3. Cases are more in than out or vice versa, falling into social/liberal ideological positions when scoring between 0.31 and 0.69. Last, cases are considered in the sets, falling into socialist and/or radical democratic positions when scoring ≥ 0.7. This choice is consistent with fuzzy-set theories, according to which the thresholds for cases to be more in or out of the sets should be located around the values of 0.34 and 0.67 (Oana et al. 2021).⁵

The list of the nine possible combinations is displayed in a truth table (Table 3), which also shows that the cases populated six out of nine ideological types.⁶ Four cases (VOX19, REP22, RN22, FI22) were excluded from the classification as there were no paragraphs in at least two indicators within each axis. While the few references to the digital transition indicate that these parties approximate Platform Neoliberalism, data from the French Republicans and National Rally as well as Go Italy suggest that these parties do not incorporate the digital transition as a critical element to their ideologies. On the other hand, The Voice's (Spain) most recent evolutions suggest that the party is positioning along the lines of the League (Italy) and Alternative for Germany, viewing the digital as means to prompt anti-immigration agendas and anti- social media's censorship on radical right discourses (Vox 2023).

Table 3. Ideological Positions on Platform Societies: Typology

In the next section I specify how, after sorting manifesto paragraphs into sets, I have run a thematic analysis of how different ideas by parties in each type connect to each other (Braun and Clarke 2006) to identify a core theme for each approach that sheds light on the particular function the digital transition plays on parties' ideologies.

A typology of parties' ideological positions on platform societies

Parties' scores are detailed in Table 4 and plotted in Figure 3. In this section, I analyse how parties within the six ideological positions conceive of the digital transition as a means to reshape their core ideologies.

Table 4. Ideological Positions on Platform Societies

Note: Scores by party.

Figure 3. Typology of Parties' Ideological Positions on Platform Societies: Scatterplot.

Platform Neoliberalism: Digital platforms as fuel for competition

Platform Neoliberalism conceives the digital transition as fuel for market competition and as a means of depoliticizing potential areas of social antagonism in both digital economy and digital politics. Therein, ideas about digitalization reinforce the defence of neoliberalism not as ‘a set of policies, but a totalising worldview built on a radical separation and sanctification of “the market”’ (Mudge 2011: 340).

This support for digital commodification naturalizes a TINA (there is no alternative) logic, promoting market efficiency as the benchmark of desired social good. This position on platform societies is found in nine cases. Three are the radical right parties Alternative for Germany (AFD21), the Italian Brothers of Italy (FDI22) and League Salvini Premier (LSP22). Two are moderate right-wing parties: the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU21) and Spanish Popular Party (PP19). Four are liberal democratic parties: the French The Republic on the Move (LREM22), German Liberal Democratic Party (FDP21), and Action-Lively Italy (AZIV22), and the Spanish Citizens (Cs19).

Platform Neoliberals emphasize innovation as key to improving national economic competitiveness and increasing opportunities for citizens (AFD21, PP19, AZIV22). A clear example is the aforementioned FDP21 proposal for the ‘digital freedom zones’ (see above).⁷

These narratives of digital technologies play two essential functions. First, by proposing to support start-ups and innovative enterprises, propensity towards risk in market competition is made the benchmark of good citizenship (Motta and Bailey 2007). Second, digital technologies are used to justify welfare state cuts. Indeed, parties' manifestos of this type are replete with promises ‘to transform public administration into a leader of digital change by erasing any kind of bureaucratic trap for society and companies’ (PP19).⁸

While sharing an overarching approach to platform societies, the different core ideologies of these parties result in different emphases. The discourse analysis conducted here identified three different horizons: libertarian, conservative or nativist neoliberal views of digitalization. These differences are particularly evident in the German manifestos. Starting with the libertarian approach, the FDP21 pledges to ‘reject the potentially complete digital surveillance of people through the use of ‘state trojans’, especially for intelligence purposes.⁹ Quite differently, the use of digital platforms to improve border policing and contrast migrations is a terrain of confrontation within the right. Indeed, claims by more moderate parties to make sure that ‘the entry at the external borders is extensively monitored through digital platforms’¹⁰ (CDU21) can be contrasted with the most radical nativist claims of the AFD21, such as, ‘police authorities should be able to use video surveillance with facial recognition software at crime-sensitive locations and buildings’.¹¹

Lib Dem 4.0: Digitalization as a magic wand for consensus

Lib Dem 4.0 envisions digitalization as a magic wand by which a relatively autonomous political sphere forges consensus within liberal democracies. The suffix 4.0 signals the emergence of a fourth stage of liberalism as an ideology at the forefront of industrial revolutions (Fuchs 2018). Two moderate left-wing parties are classified within this type: the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE19) and the Italian Democratic Party (PD22).

Unlike Platform Neoliberals, these parties' optimistic views focus on how the digital supports and promotes equal opportunities within pluralistic democratic institutions. These attributes are particularly evident throughout the PSOE19 manifesto. On the one hand, the party promises the development of the strategy ‘Spain: Entrepreneurial Nation’, a plan ‘for a more competitive productive model, in a society well equipped to tackle the challenges of the future’.¹² At the same time, the manifesto makes several claims about the need to ‘avoid digitalization bringing about new inequalities. This is why … we propose a new labour bill to elaborate the legal framework protecting workers’ rights amidst the digital decade; further, we want to take a gender perspective in this domain.’¹³

These parties are qualitatively different from Platform Neoliberals as they emphasize how digital platforms can facilitate citizen engagement with liberal democratic institutions. Digital platforms, in this respect, are yet another magic wand for the consensual renewal of liberal democracy in more participatory directions, embodied in the claim that ‘democracy needs new spaces and tools for participation’ and that this ‘must happen through incentivising participatory processes mixing in-person and online participation’ (PD22).¹⁴ Such claims for participation through digital means do not affect support for existing institutions of representation, rather, digital platforms provide citizens with new resources to take part and collaborate within existing institutions. Ultimately, the theme of the digital as a magic wand captures how these parties present digitalization as a process whose advantages outweigh the risks of social exclusion.

Social Liberalism 4.0: The digital transition as social peacemaker

Social Liberalism 4.0 conceives digitalization as a crucial process to enhance social compromises. Hence, the digital transition as a social peacemaker. While accepting capitalist hegemony and the primacy of liberty over substantive equality, parties falling within this type are informed by social views of liberalism (Bobbio 2007) and see digital platforms as tools to balance market competition with positive rights.

Five parties fall into this category: the moderate left-wing Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD21), the Italian Left–Green Europe alliance (SIVER22), the Green parties in France (VERTS22) and Germany (GRs21), and the Italian techno-populist Five-Star Movement (M5S22). These parties conceive digital platforms as advancing alternatives to neoliberalism by reclaiming the autonomy of politics in selecting investments and regulating markets. Crucially, these parties promote digitalization as a facilitator of new forms of social compromise, which require a proactive role of democratic institutions. However, the analysis also identifies different emphases on the instruments through which these compromises should be achieved. Some primarily focus on a reinvigorated function of public investments, and others promote a reformist version of the digital commons (Papadimitropoulos 2020).

As with Lib Dem 4.0, these parties tend to take optimistic views of the (capitalist) digital transition (i.e. SPD21, M5S22). However, these parties also promote views of digital platforms as facilitators of alternative non-profit-oriented forms of entrepreneurship. The SPD21, for example, claims that there ‘are already decentralised structures for promoting a socio-ecological and digital transformation of our economy’.¹⁵

Unlike Platform Neoliberals and Lib Dems 4.0, these parties promote the proactive role politics can have in tackling the negative impacts of digitalization on the environment (for instance, claims of VERTS22 on ‘digital wastes’). Moreover, Social Liberals 4.0 aims to tackle the reproduction of gender and racial inequality in digital spaces. This point is well illustrated by the claim of GRs21 that ‘the digital industry needs a cultural change, to better exploit its full innovative potentialities. Voluntary and mandatory measures for digital companies are necessary to enable equal access to creative positions.’¹⁶

The analysis identifies two paths within Social Liberalism 4.0. When attached to more traditional ideologies such as Social Democracy, parties emphasize matters of public investments in ‘Industry 4.0’ and digital education, whereas digitalization is critical in constructing new approaches oriented to the ‘common good’ by the Green parties and the M5S22. This is the first group of manifestos whereby, alongside generic references to issues of personal data protection, parties claim the necessity of autonomous and public digital platforms to engage citizens within formal democratic processes (GRs21, M5S22).

To sum up, Social Liberals 4.0 seek to promote moderate alternatives through social peacemaking platforms. While there is the acceptance of capitalism as the bearer of economic opportunities, these parties affirm the need for an autonomous space for politics to promote positive rights.

Post Social Democracy: The digital as toolkit to reassemble democracy

Post Social Democracy conceives the digital as a toolkit to reassemble popular democracy and for politics to assert its primacy over the forces of capitalist markets. Parties within this type, the French Socialist Party (PS22) and the Spanish We Can (POD19), propose digitalization as a paradigm shift towards cooperative modes of production and enhanced substantive democratic participation. This approach is Post Social Democratic, because it moves beyond the roots of Social Democracy in industrial societies and their political organizations: namely unions and the mass party (Bremer 2018).

Post Social Democracy is the first view of the digital whereby a critique of platform capitalism and surveillance becomes a salient attribute of parties' narratives. However, these critiques do not reach the point of rupture with capitalism. Instead, both parties see the digital as key to promoting alternative productive models, which ‘requires keeping public leadership of digitalization in the industry and services’¹⁷ (POD19). But these alternative models still see a role for ‘financial actors and the GAFAM’, who ‘must be held responsible for supporting the ecological transition and for reorientating our economy’ (PS22).¹⁸

These views on the oligopolistic nature of the digital economy are associated with more positive beliefs in digitalization as a facilitator of a radical renewal of democracy. Both parties critique the ‘dispossession’ of democratic rights operated by neoliberal politics, and see digital platforms as tools for constitutional renewal by allowing, for example, citizen-initiated law proposals (PS22) and participatory budgets (POD19).

All in all, the digital as a potential democratic toolkit explains the stance of Post Social Democrats in seeking to hold together a soft critique of digital capitalism with confidence in the possibilities of popular democracy to rebalance and roll back the power of oligopolistic tech companies.

Techno-Statist Socialism: Digitalization as a defensive trench

Techno-Statist Socialism conceives the digital transition as a trench of defence from new attacks on workers' rights. Unlike Platform Socialism (see below), this critique is not the basis for developing a proactive strategy to exploit digitalization to advance the disruption of capitalism. Instead, anti-capitalist forces conceive themselves as in a trench with a disposition of the instruments of state-driven agendas to tame or potentially roll back the hegemony of platform capitalism.

One case of Techno-Statist Socialism is the French Communist Party (PCF22). The views of Techno-Statist Socialists are concerned with how state-driven policy agendas must protect workers without seeing digital platforms as sites of potentially alternative modes of production.

This defensive approach therefore offers little reflexivity on how digital platforms may be tools to activate radical forms of democratic participation, as with the Post Social Democratic or Platform Socialist views. The emphasis is instead on adjusting traditional forms of social and political organizations to the digital sphere. For instance, Techno-Statist Socialists may seek to use platforms to unionize gig workers of delivery services, rather than envisioning how digitalization can renew resistance and antagonism.

Therefore, the trench theme is indicative of a defensive stance by Socialist parties, which, while criticizing the negative impacts of platform capitalism, overlooks whether and how alternative digital futures have been connecting multiple forms of resistance.

Platform Socialism: Digitalization as an invigorating battlefield

Platform Socialism conceives the digital transition as a battlefield which can potentially invigorate the antagonism to capitalism. Parties within this type are The Left (LINKE21, Germany) and Unbowed France–Popular Union (LFIUP22). These parties promote narratives depicting Platform Socialism as a close approximation of what James Muldoon has theorized as a movement ‘driven by antagonistic practices and a resistance to commodification and exploitation … [which] connects the struggles of different policy spheres’ (2022: 14).

Contra Techno-Statist Socialism, digitalization is not a means to defend the working class, but an opportunity to shape a battlefield to connect multiple instances of resistance (Hrynyshyn 2021). Indeed, Platform Socialists understand digital platforms as a space to confront and roll back capitalist hegemony because ‘the digital revolution should not be frightening citizens, but it will not succeed if we let it in the hands of multinational corporations’ (LFIUP22).¹⁹

Narratives on anti-capitalist digitalization inform these parties' most salient agendas, such as initiatives aimed at the reduction of working hours to 32 (LFIUP22) or 30 (LINKE21) hours per week. Similarly, these parties see digital platforms as powerful tools to shift from liberal to radical democracy. First, Platform Socialist parties utilize digital platforms as commons to mobilize activists in their campaigns. Second, the digital transition is conceived within Platform Socialism as an agora of political conflict, as with the LINKE21 propositions to ‘develop new forms of digital participation for democratic decisions … These rules will challenge data commercialization within the strategies for “smart cities” and “governments”.’²⁰

To sum up, Platform Socialists depart from Techno-Statist defensive approaches and consider digitalization as an stimulating battlefield wherein disenfranchised groups can be connected into a transformative and radical movement.

Discussion: The ideological divides of platform societies

Table 5 summarizes the main findings of the empirical analysis. The critical approach and its application to study parties' ideological positions on platform societies allow us to develop a theory of the emerging ideological divides on the digital transition in Western Europe. This theorization makes two key contributions to the literature on the relations between politics and the digital transition.

Table 5. Ideological Positions of Platform Societies

Summary of Findings.

First, the typology of parties' ideological positions provides an empirically informed toolkit to better understand alternative views on both digital economic and digital political relations. By looking at how parties combine, for instance, neoliberal views of platforms as fuel for capitalist competition and the slimming down of the state, it becomes possible to make sense of the multiple ways through which the hegemony of platform societies is supported through the agency of political parties. At the same time, by considering the positions in the middle ground of the ideological space (e.g. Lib Dem and Social Liberalism 4.0), research on platform societies can go beyond dichotomous theorizations of digital politics (Bessant 2014; Dyer-Witheford 2015).

Second, the typology provides the basis for a theory of the ideological divisions on platform societies, which the findings indicate are shaped around three main positions: Platform Neoliberalism, Social Liberalism 4.0 and Platform Socialism. Indeed, these ideological approaches not only make sense of the vast majority of cases in this research (16 out of 21 parties) but also indicate the maximum points of consistency between parties' goals (either conservative, reformist or transformative) on both digital economy and digital politics. These three poles shape the debates on the digital transition and represent a triad that partially cross-cuts parties' general ideological positions. For instance, when comparing the proposed classification to parties' positions on the left–right economic and GAL–TAN axes (Jolly et al. 2022), it becomes evident that views on the digital transition modify parties' distribution. Details of these measurements are in the Appendix (see Supplementary Material). To give two examples: Green and social democratic parties' positions on the digital economy signal a shift to the right by these parties by 28% on average in comparison to the left–right socioeconomic axis. Even more strikingly, the findings on the digital politics axis locate Liberal Democratic parties closer both to the moderate and radical right parties, indicating a difference, on average, of 42% with the GAL–TAN axis, suggesting that the positions on the digital transition do not reinforce their libertarian views. While this article can only provide an impressionistic snapshot of these differences, more research is necessary to confirm the hypotheses that ideas on the digital economy tend to move centre-left parties to the right and that Liberal Democratic parties shift towards conservativism on issues surrounding digital politics.

To some extent, the adoption of a critical framework which classifies parties against transformative views of platform societies tends to flatten specific differences within the types, as highlighted in the case of Platform Neoliberalism. Nevertheless, the ideological consensus connecting radical right to liberal democratic parties is a fruitful perspective to interpret European politics' reluctance to promote radical agendas to tackle exploitation and domination by big tech companies (Roberts et al. 2021). Despite the ideological differences between liberal democratic and radical right parties on matters of individual liberty and multiculturalism (Norris 2020), this analysis shows how both these party families contribute to promoting the commodification of digital data as the primary mechanism to foster capitalism's reproduction (Srnicek 2016).

When looking at the second polarity, Social Liberalism 4.0, the findings show how soft regulatory approaches connect moderate left and Green parties around the centre of the two axes. While these parties embrace digitalization as advantageous for capitalist growth, they also emphasize the need to tame and balance capitalism's excesses. This emphasis focuses on promoting positive rights, and, above everything, improving digital education to facilitate opportunities for individuals (Burger-Helmchen and Meghisan-Toma 2018).

Finally, the empirical analysis of the Platform Socialist pole identified how some parties are advancing the radical claims of social movements promoting alternative models of digitalization (Birkinbine 2018). This indicates how platform societies are providing fresh ideological resources to foster a critique of capitalism and visions of alternative futures.

To sum up, the typology developed here identifies the spectrum of views on digital economy and digital politics. The typology allows us to identify the key themes through which political parties envision the digital transition as means reshaping their ideologies. This expands on previous research which identified that the increased salience of digital issues resulted from spill-over effects (König and Wenzelburger 2019) by specifying the different directions in which the digital is pointed when attached to different ideologies. Identifying the tripartite ideological divide discussed above provides a means of understanding recent developments in policymaking and party politics concerning digitalization.

Concluding remarks

This article develops a theory of the ideological divides on platform societies within a sample of political parties in Western Europe. First, through a critical approach I elaborated the core concepts and indicators related to ideological contestation on digital economy and digital politics. Second, through set-theoretic methods, I typologized parties' ideological positions on platform societies. For each type, I identified the overarching themes through which appeals to the digital transition reshape parties' core ideologies. Finally, by examining the distribution of cases, I theorized the emergence of a tripartite ideological divide on platform societies. This theorization has the potential to inform three main research agendas.

First, the findings enable further content analysis on parties' positions using large datasets. For instance, the different positions identified on the digital economy could be used to develop a spectrum of pro-digital markets to pro-digital public positions. Such a project could include multiple codes, enabling research on whether and how parties' positions differ on issues which are more strictly related to digital policy (for example, concerning the regulations for online privacy protection) and digitally framed issues (as those concerning the digitalization of industry or public services).

Second, the three main ideological poles identified on platform societies can prompt analyses of how these ideological postures relate to parties' performances in terms of digital public policy agendas. More concretely, this article provides a framework to explore to what extent the ideological approaches parties adopt correlate with specific positions in debates surrounding digital markets or the implementation of artificial intelligence. Further, network analysis can uncover whether ideological proximity predicts collaboration or competition among parties.

Third, this theorization can stimulate comparative research agendas on whether different ideological approaches are a predictor of how parties use digital platforms for their organization and communication. Indeed, literature on digital politics has either focused on how parties use platforms or on the effects of their digital communication on matters of participation, citizens' engagement and polarization (e.g. Deseriis 2020; Vaccari and Valeriani 2021). Based on this article's findings, research can now assess the correlations between parties' ideological approaches and alternative forms of digitalization, advancing knowledge regarding the strategies party elites implement when engaging with digital spaces and media.