The platformisation of party politics?: A comparative study of party websites’ technological infrastructures 2012-2021

Abstract

Political parties have gone digital. Political scientists in countries around the world have diagnosed the rise of the digital party and traced parties’ adoption of digital technology. Existing attempts to understand parties’ digital practices have focused on the adoption of different tools, with scholars empirically studying and theorizing how and why digital technology is used. What has received less attention is the technical architecture and origins of these tools, questions that have been more directly examined by political communication scholarship. In this paper we entwine insights from these two disciplines, interrogating the idea of ‘platformization’ in the context of political technology. Presenting a unique, longitudinal dataset that captures the technological development of political party websites in 66 parties in 16 countries, we provide unprecedented insight into the evolution of party websites and show evidence of increasing platform dependency. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of parties’ relationship with technology, showing how technological developments and monopolies can lead to increasingly homogenized practice internationally.

Full text

Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024), 1–40 10.51685/jqd.2024.018
The platformisation of party politics?: A comparative study of
party websites’ technological infrastructures 2012-2021
KATE DOMMETT
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom1
FENWICK MCKELVEY
Concordia University, Canada
GLENN KEFFORD
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Political parties’ have gone digital. Political scientists in countries around
the world have diagnosed the rise of the digital party and traced parties’
adoption of digital technology. Existing attempts to understand parties’
digital practices have focused on the adoption of different tools, with
scholars empirically studying and theorizing how and why digital
technology is used. What has received less attention is the technical
architecture and origins of these tools, questions that have been more
directly examined by political communication scholarship. In this paper
we entwine insights from these two disciplines, interrogating the idea of
‘platformization’ in the context of political technology. Presenting a
unique, longitudinal dataset that captures the technological development
of political party websites in 66 parties in 16 countries, we provide
1Author 1: k.dommett@sheffield.ac.uk
Author 2: fenwick.mckelvey@concordia.ca
Date submitted: 25 October 2024
We would like to acknowledge Luciano Frizzera who played an early role in the development of this paper
and trailed data collection.
Copyright © 2022 (Kate Dommett). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-
commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at: http://journalqd.org

Dommett, McKelvey, Kefford Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024)
unprecedented insight into the evolution of party websites and show
evidence of increasing platform dependency. Our findings have important
implications for our understanding of parties’ relationship with
technology, showing how technological developments and monopolies can
lead to increasingly homogenized practice internationally.
Keywords: political parties, platform politics, digitization, web analytics,
privacy, tracking
Over the past two decades scholars have traced parties’ adoption of digital
technology. Describing the rise of ‘digital first’ parties and the uptake of digital tools by
legacy parties, digital technology has been shown to be an embedded feature of party
organization internationally (Barberà et al., 2021; Margetts, 2006). It has therefore
become routine for parties to have websites and social media presence (Kruikemeier et
al., 2015; Norris, 2003), and to gather and utilize digital trace data to inform their
campaign activity (Kefford, 2021). In this new ‘fourth era’ of communication, web
technologies have therefore become routinized (Magin et al., 2017; Römmele and
Gibson, 2020). To date, attempts to study parties’ use of digital technology have focused
on the adoption of different techniques. Political scientists have therefore detailed the use
of different media channels and techniques, tracing practice on blogs, social media,
websites and mobile devices (Davis, 2009; Gibson et al., 2003; Jackson, 2003; Jackson
and Lilleker, 2011; Lilleker et al., 2011; Tromble, 2016; Vaccari, 2014). This work has
offered important insights into the intention, practice, and implications of digital adoption
from a party perspective, highlighting how technology is perceived, deployed and
consequential for society. Whilst important questions, within this paper we draw on
insights from political communication to instead interrogate the technical infrastructure
that facilitates parties’ digital activity. We ask what technology is being used on party
websites and how this has evolved over time. Categorizing different ‘types’ of
technology, we aim to reveal more about the aims of the technology being used by parties
and reflect on whether ‘platformization’ - which theorizes that commercial institutions
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JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
and specifically digital platform companies can exert power over political systems
(Gillespie, 2018; Van Dijck et al., 2018; Dommett, 2021; Kreiss & Jasinski, 2016) - has
led parties to converge on the use of certain technologies, regardless of ideological or
country-level differences. Such questions, we argue are important for our understanding
of the relationship between citizens and parties, spotlighting the power of technology to
shape the democratic experience citizens have.
Our analysis is focused particularly on the websites of political parties, a
technology Nielsen (2012) observes is one of the ‘mundane’ technologies that facilitate
party activities. Presenting longitudinal data from over 66 parties in 16 countries, we
offer an exploratory study that provides evidence in support of the platformization thesis.
Specifically, we find widespread adoption of third-party technologies that have increased
across all parties. We find that major United States (US) firms are the predominant
provider of third-party trackers. As such our paper contributes much needed empirical
insight into the technologies embedded on party websites and reveals hitherto opaque
technological dependencies which affect how parties’ technological adoption practices
should be understood.
Literature review
Political science scholars have long studied the ways in which new media affects
the political system. This includes scholars examining the perceptions, practice, and
implications of numerous technologies, tracing the rise of social media, blogs, mobile
applications, among numerous other studies (Davis, 2009; Gibson et al., 2003; Jackson,
2003; Jackson and Lilleker, 2011; Lilleker et al., 2011; Tromble, 2016; Vaccari, 2014).
Within this body of work, a key area of the scholarship for our focus in this article has
been on the ways that party technologies are constructed and maintained. Seeking to
move beyond studies that describe the ‘front end’ of parties’ online presence, scholars
such as Gibson have called for additional attention to be given to the ‘less visible
activities, personnel, and infrastructure (both hardware and software) that lie beneath this
outward exterior’ (2020; p.6). Such work has drawn attention to the way that parties’
digital activities are built and maintained, often highlighting the importance of external
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companies and consultancy firms (Farrell et al., 2001). As Dommett et al., (2021)
highlight, these organizations not only provide strategic and specialist knowledge, but
they also often provide capacity and infrastructure, helping parties to build the
architecture of their campaign. Studies such as the analysis of NationBuilder provided by
McKelvy and Piebiak (2018) point to similar findings, revealing the role those external
actors can play in building digital infrastructure. Nonetheless, it still remains unclear
exactly how technologies are constructed, and which specific tools and techniques are
combined to build digital campaigning tools. These questions matter because they have
consequences for our understanding of citizens’ relationship with parties as they can
reveal the objectives party websites are designed to achieve and the degree to which
parties are reliant on certain external platforms to develop their web infrastructure
regardless of ideological or country-level factors.
Efforts within political science to generate insight into the architecture of digital
campaigning have tended to focus on descriptive content analysis. This is particularly
evident in studies of party websites (Norris, 2001; Gibson et al., 2003; Römmele, 2003,
p.9; Toode, 2016; Vaccari, 2008). Seen to have emerged in the mid-1990s (Gibson and
Ward, 2009, p.87), the website is a central part of a party’s brand (Foot & Schneider,
2006). Much of the early literature on party websites focused on interactive components
and the possibilities of digital democracy (Coleman, 2001), leading to studies of practice
in Belgium (Hooghe and Vissers, 2009), Austria and Germany (Russman, 2000;
Schweitzer, 2005), Finland (Strandberg, 2007), Italy (Vaccari, 2008) and many other
contexts. These interests also informed comparative analysis. Norris, for example,
conducted a content analysis of the degree of information or interactivity on 134 websites
in 15 countries (2003, p.27), whilst Kruikemeier et al. (2015) used content analysis to
identify levels of interactivity, political personalization, and mobilization on 63 websites
in 5 countries. Foot and Schenider’s (2006) seminal work on early campaign websites
categorized their functionality. They detailed how websites shifted from “brochureware”
to the interactive experiences common today, describing how website features could be
used for: Informing; Involving; Connecting; and Mobilizing. These observational studies
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JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
provide important insights, but it often remains unclear exactly how these websites are
constructed and the degree to which they rely on common or different architectures.
The scholarship on the internet points to three common web eras: Web1.0, an
early Web2.0, and the platformed web. The first is strongly associated with static, simple
websites with extensive use of third-party technologies. Web 2.0 can be defined, in part,
by the introduction of third-party Javascript libraries that allow sites to become more
interactive, almost like applications. Simultaneously, websites turned to databases, style
sheets, and third-party content management systems to offer richer user experiences, all
the while requiring greater use of third-party technologies. More recently, scholars have
diagnosed the advent of ‘the platformed web’ where web2.0’s participatory opportunities
have consolidated in a few large technology firms. According to Helmond, this can be
seen as ‘the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of
the social web and the consequences of the expansion of social media platforms into
other spaces online’ (2015: 6; see also Plantin et al., 2018, p. 3). In the realm of electoral
politics, this dominance means that platforms such as Meta, Google, or X (formerly
Twitter) exert increased power over political systems and behaviours (Gillespie, 2018;
Van Dijck et al., 2018), and play a potential role in parties’ activity (Kreiss & Jasinski,
2016). From this perspective, platforms become a key source of innovation and new
practice, but they also exert power and create dependencies around the use of their
technologies and tools. As Nielsen and Ganter have argued, platforms ‘draw many
different third parties in by empowering them to do things that each of them value and
want, while in the process leading them to become ever-more dependent on the platform
in question, increasingly intertwined in highly asymmetric relations’ (2022, p.2).
Other contributions to platformization debates have highlighted the way in which
platforms become necessary components for the rest of the Internet’s websites to operate
(Helmond, 2015). Indeed, Blanke and Pybus identified the way platforms intertwine
themselves in relation to mobile web applications, identifying how ‘platforms have been
able to technically integrate themselves into the fabric of the mobile ecosystem,
transforming the economic dynamics that allow these largely enclosed entities to
compete” (2020 p. 2). Broadly speaking, then, a few very large online platforms provide
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critical third-party technologies used across the web ecosystem. Meanwhile,
simultaneous to these developments, there has been a growing reliance on advertising for
the Internet economy (Crain, 2021). To be profitable, websites must embed third-party
technologies to participate in ad exchanges creation - a tendency described by Bounegru
et al., (2018) as the “techno-commercial underpinnings of the web”. Cumulatively, this
work suggests that platform companies are now likely shaping the affordances of
websites and it would be logical to assume that this is also true for the websites of
democratic actors such as political parties. This trend matters because it suggests that
websites, far from exhibiting practices that reflect the ideological imperatives of specific
political parties, could be shaped by the logics of platforms. Parties with ethical
commitments against surveillance could therefore be utilizing technologies that
contradict their ideas because of the dominance of certain platforms and affordances.
Previous research has found evidence that parties are increasingly using social media
platform technologies and tracking technologies (McKelvey, 2019; Kefford et al., 2023).
However, to date there has not been investigation into the precise nature of change over
time, and the degree to which ideological or country level variations found in other work
to explain variation in party practices (Dommett et al., 2024) inform the architecture of
websites. It is these questions we seek to empirically investigate.
Drawing from this literature, we identify five descriptive questions that have the
potential to cast light on our understanding of party websites and the effect of platforms
on political parties' relationship with digital technology. These questions are:
1. Are third-party technologies being used on party websites?
2. Has usage changed over time?
3. What types of technology are in use?
4. Does ideology or country-specific variables impact usage?
5. Who are the providers of these technologies and are there signs of
platformization?
In what follows, we provide an exploratory analysis designed to generate additional
empirical insight into current trends, allowing future work to generate and test causal
hypotheses.
Methods
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Our research fits with a growing field of digital methods concerned with Internet
infrastructures. Digital methods refer to technologies that repurpose digital data rather
than adapt offline methods to online environments (Rogers, 2013). Most digital methods
focus on the use of Application Processing Interfaces (APIs) and scraping to study social
activity on social media. We differ as our project repurposes web analytic data to study
changes in party technological infrastructure and the growth in platformization
(Helmond, 2017). Our project contributes to a growing interest in third-party
technologies which are standard practice for web development, but raises important
questions of infrastructural dependencies, data flows, and privacy. Comparable studies
have investigated third-party infrastructures on climate change related websites
(Alperstein, 2019) and on news websites (Libert, 2015). The methods differed in how
third-party technologies were analyzed. Libert (2015) used a custom script to detect third-
party technologies, whereas Alperstein (2019) repurposed data from the Ghostery
adblocking tracker. These approaches allow for a one-time scan but do not afford
longitudinal data.
Our project focused deliberately on political parties’ websites. Both foci require
some justification given debates about the relevance of parties and declining research into
party websites. Parties’ legitimacy might be in crisis, but the party remains central
(Ignazi, 2020). Indeed, despite the rise of other representative organizations, parties
remain organizations delivering democratic linkage (Dommett and Rye, 2018), rendering
them of ongoing interest. Similarly, we contend that whilst much recent literature focuses
on the mediation of parties through social media websites, parties still maintain websites
as a central component of their campaign, and they remain key to fundraising, volunteer
recruitment and information sharing. We argue that political party websites are a critical
site to study changing party digital strategies and infrastructures in a context where many
parties are unwilling to disclose or discuss their technological strategies (Dommett and
Power, 2021). A study of website technologies bypasses access issues and is also able to
overcome the limited memory and tenure of party officials and elites (Kreiss, 2016). A
longitudinal study of the technologies employed on party websites can therefore provide
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Dommett, McKelvey, Kefford Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024)
a new perspective on parties’ technological development, even as the literature focuses
increasingly on social media.
Our approach repurposes data purchased from a commercial web analytics
company running since 2007 allowing for research to track the adoption of third-party
technologies on the web.2 This method of analysis is advantageous in that it allows us
access to consistent comparative data across many companies, enabling descriptive
analysis. We acknowledge that in relying on commercial data our research is subject to
some risk, as the dataset is by no means comprehensive. Indeed, one member of the team
discovered that the analytics firm had not tracked a major national party in their home
country, thereby requiring that country to be removed from the dataset. Our paper
nevertheless demonstrates the utility of web analytics data to political communication,
sampling issues aside.
In selecting which parties to cover, we initially selected the top 20 advanced
democracies in the OECD and then drawing on what data was available to use, built a
dataset from the information provided from the commercial web analytics company
BuiltWith3. Parties from the following countries are included in our analysis: Australia,
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand,
Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the US. In total we included
66 parties.4 Using the Political Party Database Project (Poguntke, Scarrow and Webb,
2017), we attributed an ideological family to each party, using their classifiers of:
1. Christian Democrats/ Conservatives
2. Social Democrats
3. Liberals
4. Greens
5. Left Socialists
2 We paid for a general-purpose API access. Costs were less than $100 USD for our total study at the time.
More details about the rates can be found: https://builtwith.com/api-credits
3 As their website states, “BuiltWith technology tracking includes widgets, analytics, frameworks, content
management systems, advertisers, content delivery networks, web standards and web servers”.
4 Canada, Greece, and Poland were excluded from the sample due to lack of data. Other parties excluded
for lack of data: People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (Netherlands), Coalition of the Radical Left
(Greece), New Democracy (Greece), and Brothers of Italy (Italy).
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6. Right-wing (populists)
7. Far-right (extreme right)
8. Other
The full list of parties and their ideological family is provided in Appendix 1.
We constructed a new dataset of the embedded infrastructure used on party
websites from 2011 to 2021 (McKelvey, 2019; cf. Libert, 2019).
We selected 2011 as our starting year as BuiltWith started tracking most of the
parties in our sample after that year. After debating more statistical analysis, we focused
on analyzing technologies by days in use on a website and number of party websites
using a technology. We relied on BuiltWith’s own classification Technology Groups
classification (tag) to describe the function of different technology on websites. To make
these more intelligible and to build on existing literature we adapted Foot and
Schenider’s seminal work on early campaign websites. In contrast to their list which
detailed the range of interactivity, our coding sought to differentiate between back-end
technologies less apparent to users but necessary for websites to function. Accordingly,
we developed 6 meta-categories meant to represent broad trends in website development
globally. These categories, listed in Table 1, include:
1. Infrastructural technologies that provide basic web features from content
management systems and web hosting;
2. Interactive technologies that enable more dynamic web experiences including
javascript libraries associated with web2.0 technologies such as jQuery;
3. Multimedia are technologies that display more rich content on websites like
videos and maps;
4. Security is a proxy for technologies that implement the Secure Sockets Layer
(SSL) that encrypts communications between a web server and client;
5. Sharing are technologies that allow content to be distributed through social media
(through widgets) or feeds; and.
6. Tracking are ad and analytics technologies that track users and target ads.
The application of our coding is summarized in Table 1.
Table 1: List of technologies identified within the dataset
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ID BuiltWith Definition5Meta-Category
ads Advertising Tracking
analytics Analytics and Tracking Tracking
CDN Content Delivery Network Infrastructural
cdns Verified CDN Infrastructural
cms Content Management System Infrastructural
copyright Copyright Infrastructural
docinfo Document Standards Infrastructural
encoding Document Encoding Infrastructural
feeds Syndication Techniques Sharing
framework Frameworks Infrastructural
hosting Web Hosting Providers Infrastructural
javascript JavaScript Libraries and Functions Interactive
language Language Infrastructural
link Verified Link Infrastructural
mapping Mapping Multimedia
media Audio / Video Media Multimedia
mobile Mobile Multimedia
5 We have used the definitions provided here: https://api.builtwith.com/categoriesV4.xml.
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ID BuiltWith Definition Meta-Category
mx Email Hosting Providers Infrastructural
ns Name Server Infrastructural
payment Payment Interactive
robots undefined Infrastructural
seo_headers SEO Header Tag Infrastructural
seo_meta SEO Meta Tag Infrastructural
seo_title SEO Title Tag Infrastructural
Server Operating Systems and Servers Infrastructural
shop Ecommerce Interactive
ssl SSL Certificates Security
Web Master Web Master Registration Infrastructural
Web Server Web Servers Infrastructural
widgets Widgets Sharing
shipping Shipping Infrastructural
This approach meant we identified 31 types of technology as infrastructural, 3 as
interactive, 3 as multimedia, 1 as security, 2 as sharing and 2 as tracking. These
categories offer some broader trends although we focus on the specific technologies for
more granular results when possible.
Findings
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RQ1. Are third-party technologies being used on party websites?
To address our first research question, we began by looking at our entire dataset.
At the most basic level, we found evidence that parties rely on third-party technologies to
deliver their websites. Universally, all party websites used some third-party technologies.
Parties averaged 11 technologies on their websites in 2011, a number that increased to 72
in 2021. These numbers grew across all 24 technology categories and across all 66
parties. Our descriptive analysis showed that in 2021, on average, parties used a mixture
of technologies, including up to 17 JavaScript libraries, 7 analytics libraries, and 2.5 ad
providers. Our data also showed that minor variation amongst parties in terms of the
types of third-party technologies used. Put simply, cross-nationally, it appears that parties
used the same technology to deliver the same features. Putting this in terms of our 6
categories, across our entire dataset we found most technologies were infrastructural then
next were interactive features, sharing, and finally tracking. We found far fewer
technologies for multimedia and security.
RQ2. Has usage changed over time?
Our second question looked at trends over time. To answer this question, we
looked at longitudinal usage for each specific piece of technology. For each of our 6
types of meta-categories, we observed an increase in use over time, indicating that more
party websites are using more third-party technologies. The rates of growth vary per
technology (see Figure 2). The table here shows the growth in the number of third-party
technologies by meta-categories.
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JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
Figure 1: Growth in Tracker Usage by Meta-Category
Political parties over time used more third-party technologies to deliver their
websites. All meta-categories grew but interactive and infrastructural technologies
experienced the most, suggesting an increase in website complexity. Party websites, in
short, needed more third-party technologies to match user expectations (Corrocher,
2011). Figure 1 illustrates a growth in the overall number of trackers in use, showing
steady growth in dependency of political websites on third-party technologies. Counting
the number of technologies in use, however, does not entirely describe the trends here as
even meta-categories with lower growth still have steady usage. Figure 2 illustrates the
difference between growth and churn. Parties used technologies on average from 4 years
for Multimedia to 2.5 years for Tracking. In some categories, parties used a lot of
different technologies. Multimedia and Security technologies, by contrast, involved a few
technologies in for longer and less churn. The stability in Security technologies, as we
discuss, is part of an important trend toward more secure browsing experiences seen
across all websites.
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Figure 2: Average days in use per meta-category
These results demonstrate that over the period of study, party websites changed from
relying on few to a lot of third-party technologies, pointing to their increasing
significance for party websites to operate effectively.
RQ3. What types of technology are in use?
To answer our third research question, we provide an overview of the
technologies observed across our selected cases. It was possible to detect a range of
different technologies being used by parties internationally. In total, political parties used
over 1,340 different technologies with 408 Infrastructural technologies, 313 Interactive
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technologies, 263 Sharing technologies, 254 Tracking technologies, 43 Security
technologies, and 38 Multimedia technologies as seen in Table 2.
Table 2: Types of Technologies observed on Party Websites
Meta-Category Technologies in Use
Infrastructural 494
Interactive 343
Multimedia 42
Security 44
Sharing 293
Tracking 275
Within these categories, the most prevalent technologies were javascript, widgets,
analytics, whilst CDN (Content Distribution Network) technologies followed closely
behind.
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Figure 3: Most used technologies by type
In Figure 3, each circle represents a distinct third-party technology color-coded by
category and size varied by overall usage. In interpreting this data, it is useful to know
that small dots are third party technologies that were used for only a short period of time
before being retired, whereas large dots signal technologies that have been used for a
longer period of time. Comparing across categories, we can start to see differences in the
number of longstanding third-party providers. A few technologies have been labeled to
demonstrate the differences in technologies encountered. Google Analytics is the first
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JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
piece of technology worth pointing out as it is a clear stand-out in terms of analytics
technologies evident on the websites.
Party websites use a diverse range of third-party web libraries. By far the most
websites use JavaScript technologies that enable interactive websites commonly
associated with the advent of web2.0. The library jQuery6, released in 2006, is the most
popular Interactive technology and used in different versions by most parties. The uptake
suggests that party websites follow web trends by integrating JavaScript to offer more
dynamic, less static hypertext experiences.
There are lots of third-party technologies used for only short periods of time
alongside more established technologies, suggesting the presence of new entrants who
failed to secure long-term adoption or who were purchased (and absorbed) by larger
providers. Tracking technologies, displayed in yellow, illustrates a similar trend, with a
few big stable players, like Google and Meta, and lots of little players used for shorter
periods of time. Looking in more detail here, we can see some small firms like DemDex
and Omniture SiteCatalyst being acquired by larger firms, in this case Adobe. Similar
developments occurred to Datalogix and BlueKai DMP, who were acquired by Oracle.
The limited longevity of many smaller firms is therefore explained both by a failure to
embed their solutions, and by mergers and acquisitions. The same finding applies for
JavaScript, depicted in teal, with a few big players and lots of little ones.
RQ4. Does ideology or country impact usage?
To investigate our fourth research question, we sorted our data using the
ideological family labels provided by the Political Party Database Project. As outlined
above, we investigated the patterns of technology adoption across the eight types of party
they identify. Adopting this approach, we found that party families do not seem to
influence technology adoption significantly with little deviation (St.Dev in 3.175036339
in 2011; St. Dev 10.4628587) between party families. Even for ad trackers and analytics
technologies, there is no clear pattern distinguishing parties. Data visualized in Figure 6
illustrates technologies in use by country. Google Analytics and jQuery are the most
6 While we have decided to point out jQuery in figure 3 as it is a well-known technology, it is important to
recognize that the size of jQuery should likely be bigger relative to the other technologies as it has a
number of versions.
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popular by party and by country. We see a lot of technologies, used only for a short
amount of time at the bottom right of each graph. There is a long tail effect, with lots of
experimentation but there are few clear winners.
Figure 4: Technology usage by party family. Unique technology ID (TID) on the
horizontal axis and Days in Use. Color refers to Meta-Category. The clustering in
the lower left quadrant indicates many technologies used infrequently.
When the different party families are compared – see Figure 4 – some notable
findings are evident. First, Social Democrat and Christian-Democrat/Conservative parties
have similar technology use. These are the traditional major parties - centre-right and
centre-left - in many advanced democracies with significant literature arguing that as new
technology becomes an established feature of electoral competition that it normalises
party competition (Gibson and McAllister, 2014). In other words, rather than opening up
opportunities for new players to break through, instead the trend reinforces existing
disparities, especially around resources. Second, the technology usage of other party
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families that have been historically less influential or successful, such as the Far Right or
Right-wing Populists look different to the Social Democratic and Christian
Democratic/Conservative parties. However, these parties have been increasingly
successful over the last twenty years and if the normalization thesis was to hold, the
expectation would be that they would start to look like the parties discussed above in
terms of the use of technology. There is, of course, an argument that could be made that
due to ideology parties such as these - and perhaps the Green parties - are unlikely to
follow this trajectory, but this remains an open question.
Figure 5: Technologies usage by country in terms of days in use (upper) and
technologies in use (lower). Unique technology ID (TID) on the horizontal axis and
Days in Use. Color refers to Meta-Category type.
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When practices in different countries are compared in Figure 5, we see a marked
difference between larger and smaller countries with larger countries using more
technologies. Notably, Tracking technologies (Yellow) are in use more in non-EU
countries especially the United States and Australia with more irregular political data
laws. These differences are modest but demonstrates how our approach could measure
the impact of privacy law changes by looking, for example, at the impact of Brexit on UK
website privacy policies.
RQ5. Who are the providers of these technologies and are there signs of
platformization?
To address our final question, we focused on the idea of platformization, and
specifically the degree to which a specific firm dominates or has become integral to
website infrastructure. We truncated third-party technology names and looked for
common prefixes. Doing so, we identified numerous technologies linked to jQuery,
Google, Wordpress, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Cloudflare. We then reviewed the
truncations to try and match technologies with their owners.
Looking first at the degree to which certain third-party technologies dominate
within these categories, Most are owned by Google, with DoubleClick.Net and Google
Analytics present on 92 per cent of party websites, and YouTube on 91 per cent of party
websites. Google Analytics is Google’s free service offering website administrators a
dashboard to analyze their traffic. Google may collect data from this service if the user
approves. Google acquired DoubleClick in 2008, merging the online advertising firm into
the search engine’s advertising business. YouTube, finally, demonstrates the growing
connection of party websites to social media and the particular turn toward YouTube as a
campaigning tool. Whereas Google enables key website functions such as analytics,
Meta’s technologies enable data flows between websites and its social media services
(e.g. Facebook and Instagram). These third-party technologies, specifically its Pixel
program, have been controversial for tracking users across websites. These findings
match our observation above about the overall influence of Google and Meta in the
technologies used.
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JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
The results illustrate that Google, Meta, and Amazon manage the most
technologies used in our dataset and the most used technologies in our dataset. Figure 6
illustrates the top 25 owners with the most technologies in use over time. We truncated
the list, but it observes a long tail effect with platforms controlling most technologies
then many smaller technologies.
Figure 6: Top 25 owners of technologies in use
The same can be found for technologies in use for the most time (or days in use). In
Figure 7, we use a pie chart to simplify the significance, but, again Google, Facebook
(now Meta) and Twitter (now X) own the most used technologies in the data.
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Figure 7: Top 10 owners of technologies in use the longest
The findings are clear. A few platforms, specifically Google and Meta, provide
critical infrastructure for parties no matter the country nor the party family. As seen
above, there is a general trend toward platformization.
To further consider the dynamics of platformization in greater detail, we look
specifically at trends in analytics and advertising technologies as one informative
example. In doing so, we can see how the dominance of certain companies - in this
instance Meta and Google - is often the result of the demise of competitor companies, and
the proliferation of tools being offered by these single providers (either through their
22

JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
demise or acquisition by other providers). The effects of platformization can be best
found in the Tracking meta-category in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Tracking Technologies in Use.
Most parties depend on Google and Meta to deliver their website. Our findings
match Blanke and Pybus’s conclusion that “the largest platforms dominate here, because
they provide the key services for everybody else” (2020, p. 11). What we find further is
that these platforms dominate in managing analytics, data not just infrastructural features.
To illustrate this trend, we present an example that compares the advertising and
analytics technologies being used on the UK Labour Party’s website. We do so as it is as
a case where we have prior research into digital campaigning and which we suggest is
likely to be representative of the non-US parties covered as it has a well-documented
history of engaging in digital campaigning and is still subject to regulatory regimes that
prescribe and limit the types of practices the parties can engage in (Dommett et al.,2024).
At the start of 2015, the United Kingdom was in the midst of a general election
that was associated with parties' use of data (Anstead, 2017), and widespread use of party
websites and social media (Southern and Lee, 2019). Despite these trends, looking at the
advertising and analytics technologies on the party’s websites, we can identify only 3 ad
providers and 6 analytic providers. By the 2019 general election the party had 12 ad
providers and 24 analytics providers.
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Dommett, McKelvey, Kefford Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024)
Figure 9: Changes in the Labour Party Website Advertising and Analytics
Technology Use between 2015 to 2019
Figure 9 depicts these changes, noticeably demonstrating the staying power of
certain companies, and the decline of smaller alternatives. In 2015, the Labour Party
relied on, for example, CrazyEgg, presumably to provide a heatmap of web activity. By
24

JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
2019, CrazyEgg is gone. Google and Facebook provided third-party utilities, especially
Google Analytics. By 2019, the Labour Party used more third-party trackers but mostly
trackers provided by Google for ad services. The graph, importantly, should be read as a
fragment not a map. Where data flows from these websites to what parts of the large
platforms are hidden. At the very least, Figure 7 shows that two years after the
Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Labour Party had expanded its use of third-party
trackers but was reliant on a small number of companies - namely Meta and Google - as
providers of these services. Whilst just one example, this indicates how the dominance
and proliferation of services coming from certain companies has led to the dominance of
certain companies.
Discussion
In this paper we set out to investigate the dynamics of party websites, exploring in
detail how technologies have been adopted in different parties and over time. Posing five
questions, we sought to offer a descriptive overview of key trends to facilitate further
analysis of this essential and yet, in recent times, often overlooked technology. We
explore trends in relation to 6 types of technology, classifying practices in relation to
infrastructural, interactive, multimedia, security, sharing and tracking technologies. In
answer to our questions, we have found evidence that party websites remain a key part of
party infrastructure and a site of investment and change. We have shown that parties are
increasingly adopting third-party technologies on their websites. Exploring variation in
practice, we investigated the degree to which ideology and country affected the third-
party technology in use. We found that ideology - using party family as a proxy – and
nationally do impact use, with bigger countries and more dominant parties more prone to
use third-party technology, an indication of party professionalization and technological
capacity.
Most significantly, findings provide international evidence of platformization on
party websites. Political websites, simply put, could not exist without the support of
Google and Meta to a lesser extent. Reviewing our data, we found that a small number of
companies were providing almost all our parties with the same product, and that certain
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Dommett, McKelvey, Kefford Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024)
companies were providing a raft of products. We showed that Google, and Meta produce
libraries necessary for key functionality of party websites. Much like in the broader app
ecosystem, there is a decided influence on platform firms as critical infrastructure
providers. Parties could shift to other paid technologies, but the dominance of Google
Analytics, in its many forms, illustrates the influence of a free-to-use business model that
locks-in clients and situates political parties as just another node in a growing network of
data ingested by these large platforms.
Beyond our primary research questions, we also found two trends that warrant
further investigation. The first of these relates to securitization. There is a growing
intersection between cybersecurity and political parties. We find that there is preliminary
evidence to suggest that parties are adopting better cybersecurity practices as seen in the
Security meta-category. For example, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the most used third-
party technology. It enables websites to send encrypted data and therefore works to
promote web security. The trend is unremarkable as it matches a global turn to SSL (Felt
et al., 2017). SSL secures data from middleman or network inspection, so the tool does
not imply more secure party data practices, but rather better security of data being
collected and to website visitors. Some adoption may be related to GDPR expectations as
web businesses turn to encryption technologies to ensure compliance during data
handling (Callan, 2018).
The findings also add to the turn toward political marketing as a theory of
political communication. Political party websites behave like other websites. Indeed,
political technologies matter less than platformization. Findings complicate past studies
of the flows of political technologies, e.g. from campaigns to start-ups in the United
States (Kreiss & Jasinski, 2016). While, as we discuss in the conclusion, there might be
data limitations, the key finding is that political-specific technologies appear limited to
websites themselves with commercial applications more prominent. Parties, in short, can
rely on general-purpose technologies when possible except in their data management, as
we know from other studies, all to suggest that future studies need to acknowledge the
limitations of the political software industry and the overall influence of marketing and
commercial data analytics in the field.
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JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
Free Software
In contrast to American-centric political communication research where there is a
robust political industry (cf. Kreiss & Jasinski, 2016), we find that parties routinely utilise
open-source and free software tools (or FLOSS for short). In short, free software and
open-source technologies do matter, indicating how this third way of software production
has a major influence on party websites. Most websites depend on Wordpress, an open-
source content management system, and jQuery, another free JavaScript tool for dynamic
interfaces. Wordpress and another open-source content management system in their many
versions clearly outpace American political technology provider NationBuilder in use in
Australia, France, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom whereas Wordpress and Drupal
to a lesser extent appear across the sample.
By contrast, there is a lack of expressly political technologies being used on party
websites. Aside from NationBuilder, discussed above, other major political technologies
are often not adopted on party websites. BuiltWith does track well known technologies
such as ActBlue, NGPVAN, or ActionKit, but these technologies do not appear in the
sample. Other than NationBuilder we find limited prominence of expressly political
technology firms. The results suggest that political technologies have not largely
developed for voter experiences on party websites and that, instead, parties seem to
follow broader trends of platformization and political marketing to source their
technologies.
These findings demonstrate that studies of the political economy of software and
the political technology field are much larger than either platform solutions or political
technology solutions. The influence of Meta and Google cannot be overstated, but at the
same time there is a need to understand the politics of software development and the
afterlife of early efforts to integrate FLOSS into political campaigns (McKelvey, 2011).
Conclusion
The party website is a novel and important site of comparative research into the
digitization of party politics. Parties increasingly rely on third-party technologies to
deliver their website. These technologies, somewhat paradoxically, help parties secure
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Dommett, McKelvey, Kefford Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024)
data while also entering them into dense networks of data sharing. The findings presented
here suggest that democratic politics and the key institutions which it consists of are
becoming just one extra component in the larger platformization of the Internet. Just like
most other sectors, the influence of Google and Meta is playing an outsized role on
digital communication. So far, the bargain seems to be that Google maintains some
access or oversight into the data its analytics services help parties analyze, while Meta’s
role is less pronounced. How long this relationship can continue before platforms have a
greater influence on parties’ digital infrastructure remains an open question.
These findings raise interesting questions for those interested in parties' digital
adaptation and citizens’ experience of democratic politics. Unlike previous research
which has shown that party-level attributes such as ideology can have a material effect on
party practices, our findings reveal that ideology does not result in alternative adoption
practices. Whilst our research did find some evidence of certain parties adopting what
could be deemed more ‘ethical’ tools which rely on open-source foundations, or that
profess non-extractive values, we found that a party’s ideological foundation did not
affect its adoption of different technologies. This points to the potential power of
platformization in prompting convergence in practice. It was, however, notable that we
did find some differences in practice, with variations evident in practice when comparing
US and European parties. From this perspective regulation appears to exert a mediating
effect on technological adoption, suggesting that platforms’ power is not unfettered. Our
findings provide a first analysis of possible drivers of adoption practices and further
analysis is needed to explore the degree to which platformization is mitigated by other
factors not examined here.
Our study remains a proof of concept about how a commercial data source can be
repurposed for academic research. Our use of the BuiltWith data remains preliminary and
largely descriptive. We did consider a statistical approach, but the number of variables
meant this approach did not seem feasible. The deeper limitation is that we are replicating
the political marketing bias by using a marketing tool to analyze politics. A dedicated
political observatory may provide richer findings, but this brings its own challenges,
28

JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
namely resourcing. Clearly, research could be expanded to include a bigger international
focus or have a sub-national focus. We do not know data availability for websites outside
our case studies, but we suspect the number of cases could be expanded. The risk, like in
the case of Canada in our sample, is the data might not be usable. The other option is to
go deeper and use the data set as trace data for interviews and detailed case studies. Our
example of the UK Labour Party above demonstrates the possibility of telling rich stories
about the design and consequences of the election strategies of parties.
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Dommett, McKelvey, Kefford Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024)
Appendix 1: Political Parties in the Sample
Party Name Country Party Family
Liberal Party of Australia Australia Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Australian Labor Party Australia Social Democrats
National Party Australia Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Pauline Hanson's One Nation Australia Right-wing (populists)
The Greens Australia Greens
The Greens Austria Greens
Freedom Party Austria Right-wing (populists)
People's Party Austria Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Christian-Democrat and
Flemish Belgium Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Reform Movement Belgium Liberals
Socialist Party Belgium Social Democrats
Vlaams Belang Belgium Right-wing (populists)
New Flemish Alliance Belgium Liberals
Social Democrats Denmark Social Democrats
Socialist People's Party Denmark Greens
Danish People's Party Denmark Right-wing (populists)
Liberals Denmark Liberals
Socialist Party France Social Democrats
Republicans France Christian Democrats/Conservatives
En Marche! France Liberals
30

JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
Christian Social Union Germany Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Alliance '90/The Greens Germany Greens
Social Democratic Party Germany Social Democrats
The Left Germany Left Socialists
Christian Democratic Union Germany Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Alternative für Deutschland Germany Right-wing (populists)
Sinn Fein Ireland Left Socialists
Labour Party Ireland Social Democrats
Fine Gael Ireland Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Green Party Ireland Greens
Fianna Fail Ireland Liberals
Northern League Italy Far right
Democratic Party Italy Social Democrats
Forza Italia Italy Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Five Star Movement Italy Other
Party for Freedom Netherlands Right-wing (populists)
Democrats 66 Netherlands Liberals
Labour Party Netherlands Social Democrats
Christian Democratic Appeal Netherlands Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Left Bloc Portugal Left Socialists
Socialist Party Portugal Social Democrats
Social Democratic Party Portugal Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Communist Party Portugal Left Socialists
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Dommett, McKelvey, Kefford Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 4(2024)
People's Party Spain Christian Democrats/Conservatives
PSOE Spain Social Democrats
Vox Spain Right-wing (populists)
Centre Party Sweden Liberals
Social Democrats Sweden Social Democrats
Sweden Democrats Sweden Far Right
Left Party Sweden Left Socialists
Moderate Party Sweden Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Green Party
United
Kingdom Greens
Conservative Party
United
Kingdom Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Scottish National Party
United
Kingdom Social Democrats
Liberal Democrats
United
Kingdom Liberals
Labour Party
United
Kingdom Social Democrats
The Democratic Party United States Liberals
The Republican Party United States Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Labour Party New Zealand Social Democrats
National Party New Zealand Christian Democrats/Conservatives
Greens New Zealand Greens
32

JQD:DM 4(2024) The platformisation of party politics?
ACT New Zealand Liberals
Swiss People's Party Switzerland Right-wing (populists)
Social Democratic Party Switzerland Social Democrats
FDP The Liberals Switzerland Liberals
The Centre Switzerland Christian Democrats/Conservatives
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