Spanish universities are attempting to offer a more flexible and higher- quality education that is adapted to new social demands. As a result, they are offering a series of technological resources in both university management, as well as, in teaching and research - developments which are encouraged by the educational convergence process, occurring within the European Higher Education Area. In this article, we analyze how a group of university teachers seeks to promote an experience of active collaboration and open education amongst their students through the creation of a Wikipedia site. The goal was to promote a different, more flexible teaching system, where both the teacher and the students break away from their classic roles. This experience was started in order to achieve the following results: 1) motivate learning, 2) encourage active-collaborative learning 3) create a dictionary of the terms related to political science that helps to explain key concepts to students and the public, and 3) improve the quality of education. Despite facing certain obstacles, the results were positive: the students became committed to this practice, learned to collaborate in groups, and solved problems by interacting with their classes; their interest in subjects was increased, and useful tools for other people were created. Moreover, the teachers introduced new pedagogical methods in their classes and made learning relate to their students in a different way. In short, the results show that the use of wiki is effective in improving university teaching.

The local sphere is the participatory space par excellence. However, there are few academic studies on citizen participation in urban polities, and even less on the quality of participatory mechanisms. This article analyses two participatory processes of urban reorganisation led by the City of Madrid, based on the development of an analytical framework designed to evaluate its quality, with the objective of knowing which initiative enjoys the higher quality, and of proposing a series of recommendations that would contribute to ensuring the successful development of these processes.

Processes for selecting party officials and election candidates are key aspects of the internal democracy of political parties. This is not only because they reveal who is appointed, but also because they provide insight into intra-party dynamics and the levels of internal democracy within the parties. The aim of this article is to offer a general overview of the internal selection models used by Spanish political parties with representation in the Congress of Deputies, in order to determine whether online procedures are as widespread as is often believed, and, whether they have any real impact on intra-party democracy. We look into whether political parties are making widespread use of digital tools to promote new selection processes, whether the establishment of online selection mechanisms impacts the internal democracy of political parties and what types of parties are primarily using these tools. For this purpose we have conducted a taxonomy of the selection processes in Spanish political parties represented in the Congress of Deputies, based on the development of a model of indicators drawing on some previous studies.

Objective/context: The paper examines the contribution of think tanks (TTs) to debating ideas and their relationship with the environment. Specifically, it analyzes the variations introduced by the electoral campaign in the political positions of TTs and the role of ideology and party affiliation as possible determinants. Methodology: The content of the web pages of ten TTs is monitored before and during the electoral campaign for the 2021 presidential elections in Chile, where numerous TTs have become protagonists. For each TT, attention to socio-political issues is analyzed, and the trend of their positions is recorded. Conclusions: The analysis shows that TTs adapt their communicative agenda to the electoral campaign and that their ideology is a principal variable in this strategy. Originality: Evidence is provided on the entry of TTs in electoral campaigns with differences between conservatives and progressives.

In recent years, studies on democratic innovations within political parties have proliferated, driven by the success of new digital parties. However, there remains a gap in the literature regarding such innovations in mainstream and conservative parties, and particularly about the motivations behind their implementation (or lack thereof). This article uses as example the case of the Spanish People’s Party (Partido Popular or PP), one of the largest conservative parties in Europe with over 45 years of history. We identify the key organizational innovations introduced by the PP in the last decade and evaluate the impact of its digitalization on intra-party democracy. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the democratic innovations implemented by the PP, including party primaries at the national level for first time in 2018, mostly reflect a technocratic approach to organizational updating, characterized by elite-controlled democratization and uneven digitalization efforts, primarily focused on social media and communication purposes, with the absence of any e-voting mechanism. These findings, along with previous literature on the topic, suggest a recurring pattern in how conservative parties deal with their own democratization and adapt to the digital age.

The purpose of this study is to diagnose levels of intraparty digital democracy on Southern European political parties’ official websites and digital platforms. To this end, an intraparty digital democracy index has been developed to measure intraparty digital democracy beyond the scope of candidate selection and general participation, using the variables established by the Varieties of Democracy index as a reference. In this way, it is possible to determine whether the digitalization of parties is truly altering parties’ behaviors towards, and interactions with, members, based on the premise that democratization involves different costs, trade-offs, and challenges. This has led us to ask which dimensions are undergoing the most digitalization, why this is and, whether the origin of the parties becomes a determining factor for greater democratization of these.