The other side of platform politics. Law-making and online participatory democracy in the Five Star Movement

Between 2013 and 2021, the Italian Five Star Movement implemented an advanced tool, Lex Eletti, to enhance citizens' online participation in law-making. Elected representatives had to present their draft bills on the party's platform before introducing them in Parliament, allowing ordinary party members to discuss them and suggest modifications. This paper investigates the impact of the Lex Eletti platform on participatory democracy in law-making using text analysis and sentence embeddings to compare draft bills and their parliamentary counterparts. Our analysis of a comprehensive dataset, also including statistics about MPs' and party members' online interactions and MPs' legislative activity in Parliament, reveals that the platform had minimal impact: only a few MPs engaged with it, and user attention for bills on Lex Eletti decreased over time. Interaction between platform users and MPs was also limited. Most bills reached Parliament with little to no modifications, irrespective of platform engagement levels. The Five Star Movement's attempt to foster democratic participation through this platform did not significantly affect law-making activity.