Italian parties and the digital challenge: between limits and opportunities

This article shows how the website survives the paradigm shift carried out by the digitization of political field. How do Italian political parties use their website? The party website maintain a centrality based on a progressive functional differentiation. In fact, a careful review of the literature published over years of research - which lacks a systematic diachronic perspective - shows the functional adaptability of the website to the varying impact of digitization variables on the political field. The centrality of the website lies in becoming a cross-functional hub of the party's digital activities. The website can no longer be considered only a communication channel, but rather an element of its organizational structure. The research is carried out in a comparative perspective and considers the 10 main national parties. The national landscape is compared to the 119 most representative parties of the main advanced democracies in Europe, America, Oceania, Asia, Africa. Through the Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) we identify the most significant analytical dimensions relevant to explain the current functional nature of the websites. The analysis shows a prevailing tendency of Italian parties to activate functions that promote online and offline mobilization. As concern the communication function, Italian parties tend to activate more frequently the top-down model instead of the relational one. The website is still mainly conceived as a broadcast medium, much less as a digital communication hub. From a comparative perspective, the Italian parties - diverging from the main parties in the most advanced democracies of the World - tend not to develop functional features of mobilization in correspondence to relational communication functions is not confirmed either. The only exceptions are the Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party that develop such advanced digital functional features. Finally, as regards the ideological orientation, the results show that the functional features adopted by the Italian parties, but not only by them, is in some way also the product of the ideological orientation of the party.