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Political parties normally compete in elections individually. Yet, sometimes they join forces and form pre-electoral alliances. This rather unusual strategy contains both costs and benefits. In this article we try to identify those costs and benefits by opening up the black box of internal party decision making in considering pre-electoral alliance formation. We start by assuming that parties of different electoral sizes could have different motives to face the voter as one electoral list. Through in-depth interviews at the local level in Flanders, we have studied pre-electoral alliance formation for the municipal elections in 2006. We find that the arguments of large parties mainly focus on becoming the leading formation and thus claiming the initiative in coalition formation. Small parties have more varied motives for forming or failing to form a pre-electoral alliance. Adapted from the source document.

Political parties are the building blocks of representative democracy since they traditionally perform roles that are considered essential for the functioning & well-being of democracy. In the study & evaluation of the democratic system as a whole, as a general rule, parties are treated as unitary actors. Most political parties, however, are membership organizations & their external functioning is partly dependent on internal affairs, including the behavior & opinions of their members. In this paper we open the black box of parties & show on the basis of a 2008 survey among seven political parties how united or divided ordinary Dutch party members are with respect to various political issues & orientations. It is shown that most parties are rather united on most issues. They are least united on two of the most pertinent issues of today's politics, ie., the integration of ethnic minorities & European integration. Adapted from the source document.