RELINK2 – COST ACTION CA23114 Regaining linkage? Digital technologies improving civic engagement, political organisations and democracy
RELINK2 explores the features of the digitalisation of political organisations in the EU Member States (and beyond), with particular emphasis on reconnecting digitally and politically marginalised groups.
Introduction
The RELINK² Action emerges against a backdrop of profound transformations in political engagement driven by the digital revolution, compounded by longstanding challenges of political distrust, disaffection, and declining representative legitimacy. Over the last two decades, political organisations—including parties, NGOs, advocacy groups, and trade unions – have increasingly adopted social media and online platforms to mobilise support, personalise messaging, and streamline internal operations. Yet scholarly evidence indicates that these digital transitions have not uniformly enhanced inclusivity or restored citizen – institution linkages. Instead, they often replicate offline inequalities, with implementation varying significantly across organisational types and national contexts. Two groups remain simultaneously marginalised: digitally excluded populations (notably the elderly and residents of disadvantaged areas) and politically disenfranchised cohorts (in particular, young citizens aged 16–24). Despite extensive research into digital campaigning and online mobilisation, there is a critical lacuna regarding how political organisations’ broader digital strategies affect their capacity to re-establish horizontal linkage functions—both between citizens and institutions and intergenerationally—necessitating a coordinated, interdisciplinary framework to address this dual marginalisation.
Methods
The RELINK² Action will intensify existing networking efforts of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and countries in the EU and beyond, to address two problems:
(1) How can democracies regain legitimacy and rebuild the link between representative institutions and citizens using the benefits of digital technologies?
(2) How can political organisations connect with digitally marginalised but politically active groups (the elderly) and with digitally active but politically marginalised ones (young citizens)? RELINK² aims to find answers to three research gaps: a) the main organisational consequences of the digital transformation and their impact on re-linkage strategies, b) effectiveness of digital transformations in re-connecting intermediary structures with society, c) implementation of political organisations’ re-linking strategies to marginalised groups based on responsible use of digital tools. This requires an interdisciplinary and coordinated analytical framework.
