Enabling and Implementing: The Development of Political Party Organizations in the New Technology Era

Party politics is the concentrated embodiment of political modernization, and the information technology advancement plays an important role in the development of party politics. This paper tries to analyze the influence of new information technology on the development of political party organizations with two concepts of “technology enabling” and “technology implementing”. “Technology enabling” emphasizes the impact of technology on governance itself. It is manifested by the use of mobile Internet technology by political party organizations to strengthen “persuasion-propaganda”, and the use of positioning and data analysis technology to “guide-manipulate” the election. “technology implementing” refers to the institutional lag in the use of technology by political parties, while political parties tend to implement new technologies in a way that strengthens the existing structure.