Digitalisation without democratisation: Organisational conditions for deliberative override capacity in European parties

Contemporary political parties are digitalising their internal processes at an accelerating rate, yet higher levels of digitalisation do not consistently translate into deeper internal democracy. This article builds a diagnostic framework around deliberative override capacity (DOC), the organisational conditions under which members can access, contest, and reverse technically mediated decisions. Combining an exploratory analysis of the DIGIPART dataset (n = 76) with a theory-building statutory analysis of 18 parties across seven countries, we find that only two parties exhibit the full statutory configuration associated with robust DOC, while most combine formal participatory commitments with executive or proprietary control of the digital infrastructure. A DOC proxy applied to the seventy-six parties indicates that DOC captures variation existing indices do not: parties scoring highly on democratic digital-innovation indices may nonetheless exhibit governance indeterminacy, that is, a formal participatory commitment without any statutory specification of who controls the digital infrastructure. We develop a heuristic typology of override configurations across ideological families and draw out its implications for party-organisation research and party law. The design is configurational and cross-sectional; we identify co-occurrence patterns rather than causal effects.