Digital Transformation of Political Parties in Russia: Organisational Activities and Legal Restrictions

Introduction. Digital technologies are transforming not only the methods of political communication but also the organisational and procedural forms of activity carried out by the political parties. Expansion of remote electronic voting practices, implementation of digital form of signature collection, electronic preliminary voting, as well as creation of party platforms and services based on the artificial intelligence technologies emphasize the relevance of the issues of transparency of digital procedures, personal data protection, cybersecurity, and equality of political participation. The scientific problem set forth in the study refers to the existing model of legal regulation of political party status in Russia, which is mainly based on the territorial and organisational principle and, therefore, creates non-conformity of the party institution juridical construct to the actually developing digital forms of its activity. The aim of the study is to reveal the main trends in digital transformation of political parties in Russia, assess legal and organisational consequences of this process, and propose approaches to improving legal regulation of party activities.

Materials and Methods. The study is based on the analysis of the laws regulating political party activities, elections, and personal data protection, as well as empirical data on digital activity of political parties. Dogmatic legal, system analysis, historical and content analysis methods were used to conduct the study, as well as legal modeling approach to developing a risk-based regulatory model.

Results. It has been established that digital transformation of the parties evolves at three interconnected levels: procedural, organisational, and communication-political. It has been shown that digitalization not only expands the scope of the forms of participation for party supporters having no formal membership, and transfers certain party functions to e-platforms, but also causes new risks arising from the verifiability of digital procedures, automated data selection and processing, and creation of synthetic content. Having a single set of requirements for all digital activities has been proved to be insufficient: the scope of guarantees should depend on the legal significance of a procedure and potential consequences of a technical error.

Discussion and Conclusion. Based on the results of the study, a risk-based approach to regulation of digital activities of a political party has been proposed. The scope of legal guarantees should depend on the scope of potential consequences of using digital procedures, and ensure the availability of accessible offline alternative, transparency of automated processing, independent audit, and efficient monitoring and appeal mechanisms. The theoretical significance of the study lies in differentiation of the levels of political party digital transformation, whereas practical significance – in the possibility of using the proposed model for improving the legislation and internal party regulation.

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