Mapping the Digital Landscape: An Analysis of Party Differences between Conventional and Digital Policy Positions

Although digitization is a buzzword in almost every
election campaign, the political parties leave voters largely in the dark
about their specific positions on digital issues. In the run-up to the 2019
elections in Switzerland, the ‘Digitization Monitor’ project (DMP) was
launched in order to change this situation. Within the framework of the
DMP, all 4,736 candidates were surveyed about their digital policy
positions and values. The DMP is designed as a digital policy
supplement to the existing ‘smartvote’ voting advice application. This
enabled a direct comparison of the digital policy attitudes according to
the DMP with the topics of the ‘smartvote’ questionnaire which are
comprehensive in content but mainly related to conventional policy
areas. This paper’s main research goal is to analyze and visualize
possible differences between conventional and digital policy areas in
terms of response patterns between and within political parties. The
analysis is based on dimensionality reduction methods
(multidimensional scaling and principal component analysis) for the
visualization of inter-party differences, and on standard deviation as
measure of variation for the evaluation of intra-party unity. The results
reveal that digital issues show a lower degree of inter-party
polarization compared to conventional policy areas. Thus, the parties
have more common ground in issues on digitization than in
conventional policy areas. In contrast, the study reveals a mixed
picture regarding intra-party unity. Homogeneous parties show a lower
degree of unity in digitization issues whereas parties with
heterogeneous positions in conventional areas have more united
positions in digital areas. All things considered, the findings are
encouraging as less polarized conditions apply to the debate on digital
development compared to conventional politics. For the future, it
would be desirable if in further countries similar projects to the DMP
could emerge to broaden the basis for conclusions.