Illuminating the Black Box: Mapping Ideological Factions in Western Democracies

• In Event: Transatlantic Advances in the Study of Party Factions

Abstract

Although many party politics researchers treat parties as unitary actors, there is growing recognition that factional conflicts characterize parties’ inner life. Because of the “black box of intra-party politics”, existing approaches to identify and measure factions only consider either individual parties or known factions. This results in two problems: limitations on generalizability and a narrow focus on established factions. In this paper, we argue that candidate surveys and congress motions enable us to use their large coverage and comparability to overcome problems of generalizability. To solve the second problem, we propose model-based clustering because it stays close to the data and requires no prior assumptions about the existence or number of factions. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed solutions using the Comparative Candidate Survey, covering parties in 14 Western democracies and 13 years for a total of 31 elections and 118 party-election pairs, as well as a novel motion database that records motions submitted to party congress across 21 political parties in three countries over more than 20 years. Our mapping of factions unveils—for the first time— that factional struggles are common to all parties but can vary substantially in their degree. Our paper provides researchers with a new data source and methodological tools to study factions comparatively.

Authors

• Ann-Kristin Kölln, University of Twente

• Jacob Robert Gunderson, University of Gothenburg