Imagine (if) Platforms. European Progressive Parties and the Digital Commons. Mapping Ideologies and Practices. Comparing Political Imaginaries. Measuring Societal Impacts

Putting the ‘people at the centre of the digital transformation’ is one of the core goals of EU strategies for the digital decade.

However, the excessive power of a few non-European big tech companies governing the digital transition also carries risks for EU citizens.

While state-of-the-art theorises and describes the new opportunities and threats of the political impacts of ‘platformisation’, the question of whether and how a new progressive politics for the digital age is emerging is rarely asked.

IMDIGICOMM will answer these questions in four steps.First, building on critical literature on the ‘digital commons’, IMDIGICOMM will elaborate a three-pillar theoretical framework to make sense of how digitalisation affects gender, democratic and productive relations.

The assumption underlying IMDIGICOMM is the emergence of a new cleavage counterposing two models of platformisation: the ‘digital as commodities’ and the ‘digital as commons’.

Second, empirical research will focus on Progressive Parties in five countries (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain) to map their ideologies and practices regarding the digital transition to assess whether they facilitate or hamper the advance of the 'digital commons'.

Third, the maps will result in a ‘Digital Commons Politics’ Index to measure the extent to which parties’ imaginaries on platform societies contribute to redirect the digital transition, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis will assess the combination of conditions that may lead to an increase in the index.

Fourth, the project will evaluate the societal impacts of transformative shifts from the ‘digital as commodities’ to the ‘digital as commons’ through a digital dashboard.

IMDIGICOMM represents a stepping stone to elaborate the theoretical and methodological tools to make sense of the politics of the digital age.

Finally, IMDIGICOMM aims to open future research pathways to systematise the understanding of the political confrontations in platform societies.