The Benefits of Conflict: How Factions Can Enhance Political Parties' Electoral Performance

Project Information

INTRAPARTY

Grant agreement ID: 101041316

DOI

10.3030/101041316

EC signature date 8 March 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 May 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 496 800,00

EU contribution

€ 1 496 800,00

Coordinated by

GOETEBORGS UNIVERSITET
Sweden

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INTRAPARTY (The Benefits of Conflict: How Factions Can Enhance Political Parties' Electoral Performance)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Political parties and voters form important relationships in a democracy. The conventional wisdom is that divided parties lose elections. Yet the empirical evidence for this is ad hoc, and there are good reasons to suspect that it is, at best, a conditional wisdom. Firstly, the factional groups that divide parties vary in many different ways, even if the conventional wisdom treats them all the same. Secondly, since factions have somewhat different preferences than the rest of the party, they could also be useful in representing additional segments of society. However, there is currently no systematic analysis of the impact of factions – whether negative or positive – on a party’s electoral result.

INTRAPARTY is a comparative study of factions and their effects on political parties’ electoral success in Europe. By answering the overall research question of When and how can factions have positive effects on political parties’ electoral performance?, INTRAPARTY launches a new scientific inquiry that challenges the conventional wisdom and seeks to explain the positive effects of factions on parties’ electoral performance.
It provides unprecedented theoretical and empirical insights into the true role of factions in representative democracies.

The project elaborates an original theory explaining factional effects on parties’ electoral performance that accounts for the inherent balancing factions face between inducing pressure but not harm on their party. Factions constitute a source of representation and reputation to voters that was previously neglected. Empirically, the project breaks new ground by combining theory-testing and exploratory approaches from research in party politics, interest group, and computational social sciences. By constructing an original comparative dataset on factions and parties over time and designing creative survey experiments to test voters’ reactions, the project tests the effects of factions on parties’ electoral success in Europe.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In a first phase of the project, the general idea, theoretical model and its empirical approach were thoroughly revised. I paid particular attention to the conceptualization of factions and related concepts as well as which type of data we could collect to identify factions. The work performed in this phase resulted in a forthcoming article on the conceptualization of intra-party friction.

In a next phase, I developed and implemented a data collection strategy for internal documents, related to party congresses in the Netherlands, the UK and Germany. Party congress motions are the ideal source of data for identifying factions and incredibly rich in their content and scope. We located and collected the party congress documents from national and party archives as far back in time as possible, digitised them (if they weren’t already), before finally extracting and annotating information from the motions. The work performed in this phase resulted in a working paper on comparative data collection in party archives.

The third pase of the project was then concerned with measuring factions across the EU-27 plus the UK, during which we have produced two new manuscripts: (a) on identifying and measuring factions across modern democracies and across time using document-based and survey-based data; (b) on developing new measures of intraparty engagement and division using party congress motions.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

1. We developed a new conceptualization of factions, which has been long overdue. Because the field is dominated by case studies and anecdotes, definitions of what factions are have been case specific, hampering comparability and real scientific progress that builds on existing findings. Additionally, a new conceptualization of intra-party frictions, related to a similar but even larger literature, was also developed. Both new conceptualizations should be of significant value for researchers interested in intra-organizational frictions and factions in particular because they offer for the first time a conceptual framework that allows comparing and systematizing existing results but also identifying knowledge gaps.

2. Our new data collection strategy for comparable intraparty documents is important for the field because political scientists increasingly turn to large amounts of textual data from parties. Our work drawing on a mix of traditional methods and methods from the digital humanities moves the state-of-the-art significantly forward, as it bridges different disciplines to take advantage of each method’s strength. Future research can get inspiration from this approach and adapt it to their needs.

3. The first dataset on intraparty congress motions constitutes major progress in the field because it has been so far highly limited in how intraparty preferences and dynamics can be studied, as evidenced by the term “the black box of intraparty politics”. The dataset lists all motions submitted to party congresses in three European countries over time, and thereby provides a unique view on what kind of organizational and political changes party members and groups of members desire, expressed behaviorally and in their own words. The dataset will allow researchers of party politics to study intraparty politics in entirely new ways, using valid, behavorial, and dynamic measures.