Online Campaigning For All? Mapping The Digital Infrastructure Of The Czech Party System During The 2025 Electoral Campaign
No.3(2026)
This innovative article maps the digital infrastructure of the nine main parties in the Czech party system – ODS, KDU-CSU, TOP09 (all part of SPOLU), ANO, STAN, Pirates, SPD, Motorists and Stačilo! – in the month preceding the 2025 general election. By digital infrastructure we mean their formalized online presence over a range of online platforms, websites, and social media portals. Methodologically, this article performs qualitative coding for eight analytical categories, looking at these parties not only through their main pages, but also through the digital platforms of their best-known politicians and a sample of local/regional branches. By performing this mapping, we reconstructed the main features in their political communication and messaging towards the electorate at large. What the data reveals is the degree of personalism, professionalism, negative messaging, and issues of focus of the different parties and their candidates. Coming now to the research question, we wanted to investigate the degree of variation between parties in the level of development of their digital infrastructure and in their style of “platform politics” and see if we could find patterns between parties according to their characteristics. To do so, we formulated a series of clear hypotheses expecting the effect of party type, electoral size, internal centralization, and incumbency on the digital infrastructure of Czech parties. The findings do not fully support our expectations but point to a crisis of traditional parties in building digital infrastructures, and a partial success for some of the new parties. Overall, this article promises to change our way of thinking about the online presence of Czech political parties.
Party systems, online campaigning, platform politics, personalism, parliamentary elections
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