Factional politics. How dominant parties implode or stabilize
In: Party politics: an international journal for the study of political parties and political organizations, Band 20, Heft 5, S. 814-815
ISSN: 1460-3683
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In: Party politics: an international journal for the study of political parties and political organizations, Band 20, Heft 5, S. 814-815
ISSN: 1460-3683
In: Party politics: an international journal for the study of political parties and political organizations, Band 20, Heft 5, S. 814-815
ISSN: 1354-0688
In: European journal of political research: official journal of the European Consortium for Political Research, Band 53, Heft 1, S. 180-199
ISSN: 1475-6765
This article investigates the dynamics of portfolio allocation within political parties to shed light on the patterns of conflict and cooperation between rival party factions. It provides a game-theoretic model that helps in explaining differences in portfolio allocation due to alternative modes of party organisation or party system competitiveness. Focusing on party congresses to estimate the number, strength and policy positions of party factions, the Italian case is analysed by testing some hypotheses generated by the theoretical model. The results shown that, overall, spoils are shared in proportion to the strength of each faction, in line with the prediction of Gamson's Law. However, there are also some important deviations from this path. Rules that foster party leaders' autonomy in fact provide them with a higher degree of discretion that will be used to reward their followers and to ward off any credible and harmful threat to party unity. Indeed, strategic portfolio allocation might balance out a lower amount of policy payoffs and becomes a strategy to restrain minorities from breaking away, thus contributing to the preservation of party unity in highly competitive political systems. Adapted from the source document.
In: European journal of political research: official journal of the European Consortium for Political Research, Band 53, Heft 1, S. 180-199
ISSN: 0304-4130
In: APSA 2014 Annual Meeting Paper
SSRN
Working paper
In: British journal of political science, Band 45, Heft 1, S. 121-139
ISSN: 1469-2112
This article investigates intra-party politics and explores the determinants of factional breakaways, going beyond the unitary actor assumption. It presents a game-theoretic model that focuses on intra-party competition and bargaining dynamics to analyse the interplay between party leaders and minority factions. It tests several hypotheses based on the formal model using a new dataset that contains information about the strength and policy positions of factions inside Italian parties, from 1946 to 2011, measured through quantitative content analysis of motions presented during party congresses. The results show that office, policy and electoral motives influence factions' decisions to break away. Other elements – such as intra-party democracy, the electoral system and party system competitiveness – also affect leaders' attitudes toward compromising and alter the likelihood of a split.
In: European journal of political research: official journal of the European Consortium for Political Research, Band 53, Heft 1, S. 180-199
ISSN: 1475-6765
AbstractThis article investigates the dynamics of portfolio allocation within political parties to shed light on the patterns of conflict and cooperation between rival party factions. It provides a game‐theoretic model that helps in explaining differences in portfolio allocation due to alternative modes of party organisation or party system competitiveness. Focusing on party congresses to estimate the number, strength and policy positions of party factions, the Italian case is analysed by testing some hypotheses generated by the theoretical model. The results shown that, overall, spoils are shared in proportion to the strength of each faction, in line with the prediction of Gamson's Law. However, there are also some important deviations from this path. Rules that foster party leaders' autonomy in fact provide them with a higher degree of discretion that will be used to reward their followers and to ward off any credible and harmful threat to party unity. Indeed, strategic portfolio allocation might balance out a lower amount of policy payoffs and becomes a strategy to restrain minorities from breaking away, thus contributing to the preservation of party unity in highly competitive political systems.
In: Party politics: an international journal for the study of political parties and political organizations, Band 21, Heft 2, S. 246-258
ISSN: 1460-3683
Sanctions and homogeneity of intra-party preferences are the two main pathways to party unity in roll-call votes. However, only a few works have managed to properly measure the degree of polarization within the party, and therefore the link between ideological preferences and parliamentary voting behaviour has not yet been fully tested. Looking at the internal debates held during party congresses and analysing motions presented by party factions through quantitative text analysis, the present article provides a new measure of intra-party polarization that is exogenous to the parliamentary arena. This measure is used to disentangle the effect of ideological heterogeneity on MPs voting behaviour, net of the party whip. Our results show that factional heterogeneity negatively affects party unity. This effect, however, is conditional on the strength of whipping resources available to the party leader. When the electoral system or the intra-party candidate selection process allows strong discipline to be enforced, the negative effect of heterogeneous preferences on party unity is lower or no longer significant. However, since absences can be a strategy by which to express dissent while avoiding sanctions, they should be considered as an additional voting option and this is crucial to understanding the impact of intra-party heterogeneity on party unity.
In: Electoral Studies, Band 31, Heft 4, S. 689-701
In: Electoral studies: an international journal, Band 31, Heft 4, S. 689-702
ISSN: 0261-3794
In: Electoral Studies, Band 31, Heft 4, S. 689-701
This work investigates the process of position-taking, focussing on the factional bargaining within the party. Exploiting two recently built datasets that estimated the policy positions of Italian parties and factions from 1946 to 2010, we investigate if and to what extent factions bind the party leader in choosing the platform. We find confirmation for the idea that party positions are linked to factional preferences. Overall, the party works as a 'bounded oligarchy'. Furthermore, the electoral payoff of party unity increases the impact of factional constraints when general elections approach. In line with the cartel party theory, however, autonomous leaders who are directly elected by a wider selectorate can get rid of factional ties choosing more moderate and vote-maximizing platforms. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]
In: Italian Political Science Review: Rivista italiana di scienza politica, Band 41, Heft 2, S. 237-265
ISSN: 0048-8402
In: European journal of political research: official journal of the European Consortium for Political Research, Band 61, Heft 4, S. 1042-1059
ISSN: 1475-6765
AbstractSwitches produce a lack of credibility and damage a party's image, signalling weakness and an inability to select loyal MPs and preserve unity. Accordingly, we consider party out‐switching as a valence loss for the party. By combining information on party manifestos with a novel database on 2053 episodes of party switching, we investigate which electoral strategies parties adopt to reduce the negative consequences of such valence loss. Analyzing 1,131 manifestos related to 135 parties in 14 Western European democracies, from 1945 to 2015, we show that parties try to restore their positive image by investing on valence, in terms of competence, clarity and core issues. An instrumental variable approach corroborates our results. The findings have implications for spatial modelling, valence politics, issue ownership and issue competition.
In: New media & society: an international and interdisciplinary forum for the examination of the social dynamics of media and information change, Band 25, Heft 3, S. 540-558
ISSN: 1461-7315
This article develops a reputational theory of political falsehoods. Politicians are motivated by the desire to build a positive reputation, therefore, they will be more likely to deliver false statements (incurring the risk of being fact-checked) when the potential benefit outweighs the cost. This happens as new elections come closer, since the electoral benefit of falsehoods increases along with the probability of being checked too late (after the election day). Politicians are less likely to issue falsehoods in detailed statements and in scripted communication, since the reputational cost is higher because such falsehoods would be considered intentional. Conversely, the stronger trust that voters attribute to politicians on issues they own, allows politicians to lie on such topics. Statistical analysis of almost 8000 statements released by politicians and assessed by fact-checkers, in the United States and Italy (2007–2018), supports the hypotheses. The results hold irrespective of party affiliation.
In: Party politics: an international journal for the study of political parties and political organizations, Band 27, Heft 4, S. 656-666
ISSN: 1460-3683
What are the effects of party defections on the attitudes of politicians who remain loyal to the party? We answer by combining multiple sources of data into a comprehensive novel data set on parliamentary party switching, to estimate how this affects the perceived distance between a politician and his party. Focusing on the theory of cognitive dissonance and the black sheep effect, we hypothesize that politicians perceive themselves closer to their parties when those parties recently suffered defections. The effect should be greater among incumbent politicians as they directly experience divisions, but also among officials dissatisfied with the leadership as their dissonance should be stronger. Statistical analyses of data from two elite surveys, on a sample of 13,256 politicians belonging to 92 parties that ran in 28 elections held between 2005 and 2015 in 14 countries, provide support for our hypotheses and shed light on the consequences of intra-party defections.