Anti-party Digital Parties Between Direct and Reactive Democracy. The Case of La France Insoumise

Abstract

This chapter analyses the use of digital platforms and its intra-party consequences by the radical left party La France Insoumise (Unbowed France—LFI), founded in 2016 by the Presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. First, we conceptualise LFI as an ‘anti-party digital party’, a type of movements designed around cyber tools both as organisational means to mobilise citizens and as new disruptive spaces prompting novel opportunities of contestation towards mainstream parties. Secondly, we focus on the digital tools through which LFI is organised, mainly structured around the ‘Action Platform’ Agir, integrating multiple functions such as registering membership, organising locally- or theme based ‘action groups’ and online voting. Thirdly, we identify the intra-movement tensions associated with the use of digital platforms, mainly between, on the one hand, the promise of horizontality and participatory democracy and, on the other hand, the centralisation of strategic decisions by party leader resulting in plebiscitarian decision-making. We conclude that digital parties as LFI constitutively oscillate between opening new opportunities of activation for citizens otherwise excluded from politics when their organisations remain open to further innovations and demobilising effects when parties’ leaders reduce the transformative potentialities of online participation to reactive means to retain their intra-party power.

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