Transatlantic Advances in the Study of Party Factions

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Although we often treat political parties as unitary actors, they are regularly riven by factional conflict. Contemporary politics is replete with examples of intraparty party conflict and cases where those conflicts have spillover effects on national politics; the Republican Party in the United States took several votes and candidates from different parts of the party to elect a new Speaker of the House after Kevin McCarthy lost the gavel; Die Linke in Germany has split with the emergence of a Sarha Wagenknecht Party; and both major parties in the UK are riven by conflict between their extreme and moderate factions.

Despite the clear relevance of intraparty conflict and competition, the conceptualization and operationalization of party factions and competition lacks consensus, creating the potential for unwarranted conceptual stretching and limiting scholars’ ability to effectively build upon each other’s work. In addition, scholars are also limited in their data sources for uncovering factions, as parties want to appear united, and their internal workings are more generally (and often intentionally) difficult to observe.

With these concerns in mind, this panel brings together scholars of intraparty competition and factions from a variety of national and comparative contexts to present recent advances in the study of intraparty conflict and engage in a dialogue to identify and bridge conceptual and methodological differences across their work. The papers in this panel engage with a variety of central issues in the study party factions—such as how factions can be identified, how they bargain with each other, why factions emerge, and how factional power distributions impact party behavior—that are highly relevant in understanding today’s changing and conflictual political landscape on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Chair

• Zachary David Greene University of Strathclyde

Discussants

• Andrew Clarke Lafayette College

• Zachary David Greene University of Strathclyde

Individual Presentations

• Intra-Party Powersharing: Theory and Evidence from Norway - Christine Bangum, BI Business School; Jon H. Fiva, Norwegian Business School; Giovanna Maria Invernizzi, Bocconi University; Carlo Prato, Columbia University; Janne Tukiainen, University of Turku

• Globalized Party Factions in the Digital Age - Mike Cowburn, European University Viadrina

• Intra-Party Factions in Inter-Party Politics - Rachel Blum, University of Oklahoma; Hans Noel, Georgetown University

• Illuminating the Black Box: Mapping Ideological Factions in Western Democracies - Ann-Kristin Kölln, University of Twente; Jacob Robert Gunderson, University of Gothenburg

• Populism and Party Success in the Modern GOP - Seth E. Masket, University of Denver