Italian political parties on the Web

To draw some conclusions about the implications of parties' engagement with the new information and communications technologies (ICTs) for the quality of democracy, this article explores the way in which Italian parties are exploiting the World Wide Web for campaigning and related functions. Italy has been chosen because it is a liberal democracy and yet has party-system and other characteristics in terms of which it differs from other democracies that have been used to explore the political implications of use of the new ICTs. Adding an Italian case study to the existing work consequently allows us to move closer to an understanding of the conditions under which the new ICTs will have an impact. Defining the quality of democracy in terms of the degree to which parties and individual citizens are afforded equality of influence in political decision making, this research points in the direction of a muted impact because of a tendency of the parties to use the new medium to carry out existing campaign tasks more efficiently and effectively rather than seek to use it in innovative ways. However,this same tendency may improve the quality of democracy in another sense, namely, by reinvigorating and strengthening the party organizations that are central to the representative process in the first place.