The internal geography of digitalization: party websites and territorial organization in the Italian case

This study examines how digitalization unfolds across the different organizational levels of political parties, focusing on the distribution of digital infrastructures among subnational party organizations. We conceptualize this uneven pattern of diffusion as the ‘internal geography of digitalisation’ and analyse the digital presence of provincial branches across five major Italian parliamentary parties. The analysis draws on a novel dataset combining automated web scraping with original indices measuring the functional breadth and structural complexity of party-owned local websites. The findings reveal substantial variation both between and within parties, a pattern more consistent with a logic of normalization – in which patterns of digitalization reflect pre-existing organizational structures – than with equalization. The analysis also shows that functional breadth and structural sophistication are analytically distinct dimensions and that the relationship between them cannot be adequately captured by approaches that treat digitalization as a single dimension.