Parties under Pressure: The Politics of Factions and Party Adaptation

Parties under Pressure

Parties under Pressure

The Politics of Factions and Party Adaptation

MATTHIAS DILLING

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83023-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83025-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83024-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226830247.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dilling, Matthias, 1987– author.

Title: Parties under pressure : the politics of factions and party adaptation / Matthias Dilling.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023050821 | ISBN 9780226830230 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226830254 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226830247 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Partito della democrazia cristiana. | Österreichische Volkspartei. | Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands. | Political parties. | Political party organization. | Political parties—Europe—Case studies. | Christian democracy—Europe. | Comparative government.

Classification: LCC JF2051 .D56 2024 | ddc 324.2094—dc23/eng/20231228

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050821

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

PART I: Problem and Theory

1  The Puzzle: The Varying Substance and Speed of Party Adaptation

2  The Theory: Factionalism, Party Adaptation, and Multilevel Path Dependence

PART II: The Main Cases

3  Italy’s DC: Centralized Leadership Selection, High Factionalism, and Centrifugal Pressure

4  Austria’s ÖVP: Decentralized Leadership Selection, Low Factionalism, and Organizational Rigidity

5  Germany’s CDU: Mixed Leadership Selection, Moderate Factionalism, and Adaptation

PART III: Comparative Perspectives

6  Christian Democratic Adaptation beyond Italy, Austria, and Germany

7  Party Adaptation beyond Post-1990 Christian Democracy

Conclusion: Lessons for the Study of Party Adaptation, Factionalism, and Party Organization

Acknowledgments

Appendixes

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.1  Christian democratic parties’ vote share before and after 1990

1.2  Initial leadership selection and relative change in vote share

2.1  Causal chain and alternative explanations

2.2  A centralized and decentralized leadership selection process

2.3  A centralized and decentralized leadership selection process in practice

2.4  A party with a mixed leadership selection process

3.1  Factionalism in the DC, 1947–1993

3.2  Italian parties’ left-right positions over time

3.3  Plurality list at DC party congresses

3.4  Fractionalization of the DC party council

3.5  Party identification in Italy in the 1980s

4.1  Occupational structure in Austria

4.2  ÖVP, SPÖ, and FPÖ election results, 1945–2017

5.1  CDU vote share in 1949 federal election by Land

5.2  Share of expellees among resident population by Land

5.3  Unemployment rate in Germany after reunification

6.1  CDS vote share in Portuguese elections

6.2  CDA vote share in Dutch elections

6.3  CSV vote share in Luxembourgian elections

A.1  Christian democratic leadership selection and relative electoral change

Tables

2.1  Factions in contrast to other intraparty groups

3.1  Centralization of the party council and party executive selection process

3.2  Strength of factional lists, 1964, 1973, and 1989

3.3  Main statutory modifications

4.1  Composition of the ÖVP leadership board (Bundesparteileitung) in 1945–1946

4.2  Preference voting in Austrian Lower Chamber elections, 1947–1986

4.3  Main proposals and modifications of ÖVP party statutes, 1947–1965

4.4  Main statutory modifications between 1966 and 1978

4.5  Statutory modifications in the 1980s

4.6  Occupational structure, Austrian population and ÖVP in 1969

4.7  Survey on NEOS’s membership composition

5.1  Party council delegates by Land branch, 1951

5.2  CDU leadership board in 1950

5.3  CDU executive committee in 1960

5.4  CDU presidium in 1962

5.5  Main organizational changes within the CDU until 1966

7.1  Initial MRP leadership board

7.2  MRP election results during the Fourth Republic

7.3  Difference between first-round vote and seat share, 1958 and 1962

8.1  Institutionalization of Christian democratic parties, 1989

8.2  Strength of the book’s and alternative theories of party adaptation

8.3  Findings on leadership selection process and factionalism

8.4  Strength of this book’s and alternative theories of factionalism

8.5  Comparative summary, origins of leadership selection process

Abbreviations

ACLI  Associazioni Cristiane dei Lavoratori Italiani (Christian Association of Italian Workers)

ADR  Alternativ Demokratesch Reformpartei (Alternative Democratic Reform Party)

AFD  Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany)

ARP  Anti-Revolutionaire Partij (Anti-Revolutionary Party)

BHE  Bund Heimatvertriebener und Entrechteter (League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights)

CCD  Centro Cristiano Democratico (Christian Democratic Center)

CDA  Christen-Democratisch Appèl (Christian Democratic Appeal)

CDS-PP  Centro Democrático e Social–Partito Popular (Democratic and Social Center–People’s Party, initially founded as CDS)

CDU  Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany)

CHU  Christelijk-Historische Unie (Christian Historical Union)

CISL  Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions)

CSU  Christlich Soziale Union in Bayern (Christian Social Union in Bavaria)

CSV  Chrëschtlech Sozial Vollekspartei (Christian Social People’s Party)

DC  Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy)

DP  Deutsche Partei (German Party)

EAK  Evangelischer Arbeitskreis (Protestant Working Group), a faction in Germany’s CDU

EXIL-CDU  Christlich Demokratische Union im Exil (Christian Democratic Union in Exile), an association in the early CDU recognized as representing the Christian Democrats escaped or expelled from the Soviet occupation zone or German Democratic Republic

FDP  Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party, Germany)

FPÖ  Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria)

GVP  Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei (All-German People’s Party)

KVP  Katholieke Volkspartij (Catholic People’s Party)

LDP  Jiyū-Minshutō (Liberal Democratic Party)

MIT  Mittelstands- und Wirtschaftsunion (Union for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses and the Economy); initially named Bundesarbeitskreis Mittelstand (Federal Working Group for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses), a faction in Germany’s CDU

MP  Member of Parliament

MRP  Mouvement Républicain Populaire (Popular Republican Movement)

ÖAAB  Österreichischer Arbeiter- und Angestelltenbund (Austrian League of Blue- and White-Collar Workers); later renamed Österreichische Arbeitnehmerinnen- und Arbeitnehmerbund (Austrian League of Employees), an auxiliary organization in Austria’s People’s Party

ÖBB  Österreichischer Bauernbund (Austrian Farmers’ League), an auxiliary organization in Austria’s People’s Party

ÖVP  Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People’s Party)

ÖWB  Österreichischer Wirtschaftsbund (Austrian Business League), an auxiliary organization in Austria’s People’s Party

PCI  Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party)

PDP  Parti Démocrate Populaire (Popular Democratic Party)

PDR  Rietspartei (Party of the Right)

PDS  Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left)

PLI  Partito Liberale Italiano (Italian Liberal Party)

PPI  Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian People’s Party)

PRD  Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution)

PRI  Partito Repubblicano Italiano (Italian Republican Party)

PSDI  Partito Socialista Democratica Italiano (Italian Democratic Socialist Party)

PSI  Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party)

RPF  Rassemblement du Peuple Français (Rally of the French People)

SFIO  Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International)

SPD  Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany)

SPÖ  Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (Social Democratic Party of Austria); 1945–1991: Sozialistische Partei Österreichs (Socialist Party of Austria)

VVD  Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy)

PART I

Problem and Theory

1

The Puzzle: The Varying Substance and Speed of Party Adaptation

I believe that dangers await only those who do not react to life.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (1989)

Around the world established political parties face mounting pressures. The rise of populism and radicalism, changes in countries’ class structures and people’s religious practices, and new policy concerns around mass migration, public health crises, and climate change have eroded many parties’ traditional strongholds and challenged them to find new ways of mobilizing support. The rise and diversification of social media have reinforced those pressures, calling for new formats to communicate political messages and facilitate participation. The very fact that many established parties from the left to the right have responded to these changes by passing at times far-reaching programmatic and organizational reforms underlines Peter Mair’s (1997) seminal verdict that political parties can be incredibly adaptable organizations.¹ However, party adaptation is far from being uniform. From Austria to Japan, parties have varied in the extent to which they have been able to reform their platform or organization in response to environmental changes. While Austria’s People’s Party (ÖVP) struggled for nearly fifty years to reform its corporatist organization and agrarian platform when facing diversifying societal interests, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) abandoned many traditional positions and shifted some power over candidate selection to party members after national reunification transformed the country’s demographic structure. Unlike Italy’s similarly dominant and corrupt Christian Democratic Party (DC), Japan’s Liberal Democrats adapted to an economic crisis and corruption scandal by centralizing the party’s organization and passing public-sector reforms. In Latin America, Argentina’s Peronists and Brazil’s Workers’ Party shifted toward market-liberal positions and expanded clientelist practices (Hunter 2010; Levitsky 2003), whereas many other labor parties failed to adapt to their shrinking trade-union base (Morgan 2011; Seawright 2012).

Why do some parties adapt meaningfully to social, economic, and political transformations while others struggle to do so? This question is of paramount importance for the quality (and perhaps even survival) of democracy. Of course, party adaptation is not automatically good for democracy. Programmatic or organizational reforms might reflect the views of fringe or radical elements, as recently seen in Rachel Blum’s (2020) study of the Tea Party’s capture of the GOP in the early 2010s in the United States. However, the absence of party adaptation almost certainly weakens democracy. E. E. Schattschneider’s (1942) argument still holds that political parties are a cornerstone of modern democracies. They exist to aggregate people’s interests and translate them into political decisions. Over time, they provide democracies with an element of predictability and stability by creating expectations about the preferences they represent. They thus facilitate voters’ decision-making and the interaction among politicians. Parties that do not pass meaningful reforms, or that do so only with a significant delay, risk fueling people’s dissatisfaction and face a heightened risk of declining or disappearing. Italy’s DC, Austria’s ÖVP, Venezuela’s Democratic Action Party—all these parties either disappeared or shrunk significantly when failing to adapt to their new environment, and radical and populist parties seized the space that opened up (e.g., Bufacchi and Burgess 1998; Morgan 2011; Müller et al. 2004). Their rise has allowed nativist and illiberal language and positions to enter the political mainstream and has entailed a global wave of democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman 2021). When several parties in the same system face pressure to adapt, the aggregation of their responses (or lack thereof) tend to transform the entire party system (Morgan 2011; Seawright 2012). Explaining why established parties vary in their ability to adapt is thus of crucial importance for the resilience of democracy at large and the topic of this book.

To approach this question, the book proposes redeeming a concept that has historically held a bad reputation in party politics—party factions, defined as organized internal groups with no formal ties to the central party. Party factions have predominantly had a poor reputation since Madison’s ([1787] 1961) essay on the evil of factionalism.² Treated as synonymous for internal divisions, factions have been associated with weakening a party’s ability to avoid fragmentation and respond to grievances (e.g., Ceron 2012, 2015; Coppedge 1994, 47; Katz 1980, 3, 6; Kitschelt et al. 1999, 136–37; Van Kersbergen 1995, 29). However, all parties are collective actors in that, as Giovanni Sartori (1976, 72) explained, they are an aggregate of individuals forming constellations of rival groups. Party adaptation is fundamentally about parties’ ability to mediate between these groups and aggregate their preferences into a single set of choices. What does the party stand for? Which voters should the party try to mobilize? How should those voters be mobilized? Agreeing on answers to these questions is challenging for any party. Party factions importantly influence how well parties are equipped to do so. Factions differ from other types of groups within political parties, like territorial branches or youth organizations, in that they organizationally span across party branches and are free to form, rearrange, and disappear without the party’s approval. This organizational pervasiveness and flexibility matter for adaptation in two ways. Factions can help integrate different views by connecting actors across different branches of the party. They can also support innovation by enabling new groups to rise and new ideas to circulate. A proliferation of competing factions, however, risks paralyzing parties’ internal decision-making. In other words, not only an extremely low level but also an extremely high level of factionalism weakens a party’s ability to adapt, whereas a moderate level of factionalism supports it. This book aims to show why and how.

What Is Party Adaptation?

Party adaptation refers to the intentional changes a party makes to its offering to voters in response to changed environmental conditions in order to meet its primary goals (Levitsky 2003, 9; see also Gauja 2016, 19; Harmel and Janda 1994, 265; Levy and Bruhn 2006, 98). When Angela Merkel took the podium on 2 December 2003, the delegates to the party congress of her Christian Democratic Union had just passed far-reaching reforms. In response to the 1998 election defeat the party had suffered for its handling of Germany’s economic downturn in the 1990s, the CDU abandoned its long-held support for a welfare state with high levels of social spending and embraced market-liberal positions. Its new program called for, among other things, replacing the linear-progressive income tax with a simple three-stage rate and a raise in the retirement age. Organizationally, the CDU shifted some power over selecting candidates for party and public office from party functionaries toward its members. When the new platform was less popular than expected, the party moderated its economic positions and instead embraced a socially progressive course. This was not the first time the CDU had reinvented itself. Initially including a notably left-wing orientation after World War II, the party’s platform moved to the right to fight off rising challengers in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, the CDU responded to the shrinking of its traditional base of churchgoing Catholics by formulating its first comprehensive party program, professionalizing its organization, and stimulating membership recruitment.

Party adaptation is not the same as success, survival, or vote share. Classifying a party as having adapted because it was successful while suggesting that it was successful because it had adapted would be circular reasoning. Instead, this book captures variation in party adaptation by drawing on Anika Gauja’s (2016) distinction between the subject, substance, and the speed of reform. The subject of reform refers to areas that members of the party’s decision-making bodies have identified as requiring changes in response to environmental transformations. Although what constitutes pressure for reform varies across parties depending on their history and context (Cyr 2017, 65; Levitsky 2003, 9; Morgan 2011, 51), party elites often have a good idea of the challenges that require adaptation. For instance, parties might have to change the type (e.g., from clientelist to programmatic) or content (e.g., from redistribution to market liberalism) of their offers to voters or adjust their organization to incorporate new social groups. Unlike the party’s rank and file, party elites, including the party leader, other members of the party’s leadership board, and the delegates to national decision-making bodies, usually have the power to introduce reforms (Gauja 2016, 14–16).³

The changes party elites introduce are the substance of reform. Elites with divergent preferences and support bases are usually involved in parties’ discussions over what and how to adapt (Seawright 2012, 23). These discussions often entail conflict, leading to the watering down of proposals or even gridlock. As a result, parties might fall short of fully addressing the areas they identified as requiring reform. For instance, to stop their party’s dependence on clientelism and corruption, Italy’s Christian Democrats discussed changing the rules for selecting party congress delegates to reduce factions’ incentives to pay local brokers, downsizing the leadership board to facilitate decision-making, and empowering the DC’s regional branches over national factions. Internal conflicts, however, resulted in only a fraction of the proposals being introduced. The speed of reform reflects how swiftly the proposed changes are introduced. Some time lag is likely. Most political parties are complex organizations, and deliberations take time. Still, while Germany’s Christian Democrats managed to introduce the aforementioned reforms within five years of their crushing 1998 defeat, Austria’s Christian Democrats required nearly twenty years after their 1990 defeat to introduce meaningful parts of the proposed reforms, many of which the party had been discussing since the 1960s. Such proposals often emerge around catalytic events, like election defeats or scandal, and this book traces how long it took parties to introduce (parts of) them following such events.

The substance and speed of adaptive reforms are thus the indicators of party adaptation that this book relies on. This conceptualization allows for reading history forward (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010, 943). Although party elites often know what they need to adapt to, they cannot know with certainty whether particular reforms will pay off electorally. Defining adaptation in electoral terms thus not only would risk introducing an element of circularity but also would rule out the potential of actors miscalculating reforms’ effects. They might overestimate their popularity among voters or, as Lupu (2016) demonstrated, be punished for diluting the party’s traditional branch and subsequently performing poorly in office. It is consequently possible for parties to adapt (i.e., introduce the reforms identified as needed and do so relatively quickly) but still lose votes. Moreover, politics is a lot about people and human agency, but there might be situations when the party simply does not have the right hand. The magnitude of the mani pulite (clean hands) corruption scandal in Italy played an important role in the Italian Christian Democrats’ demise. At that stage, it would have been difficult for any party to adapt. However, this book evidences that the corruption scandal was largely endogenous to the DC’s very high level of factionalism and that the party’s low ability to adapt had already become obvious well before the scandal erupted. Simply looking at (the number of) reforms would also not capture adaptation. Many organizational changes in political parties have been the result of path-dependent reinforcement of early organizational choices (e.g., Bentancur, Rodríguez, and Rosenblatt 2020; Krauss and Pekkanen 2011). In contrast, adaptive reforms relate to changes made in response to external events like scandals, election defeats, or dramatic shifts in public opinion and often require parties to break with previous practices.

Explaining Party Adaptation

Analytically, the variation in party adaptation points toward an important puzzle around political parties and modern democracies more broadly. The populism and backsliding literature typically paints the picture of established parties that struggle to adjust to environmental changes and are pushed aside by new organizations and movements (e.g., Haggard and Kaufman 2021; Mudde 2007, 2019; Zielonka 2018). Studies of party change, in contrast, have shown that political parties can adapt to strategic reform incentives (e.g., Mair 1997; Harmel et al. 1995; Harmel and Janda 1994). Parties as diverse as the UK Conservatives, the Liberal Party of Australia, and the French Socialists have passed far-reaching reforms to their platforms and organizations in response to election defeats, changes in rival parties, and scandals—especially when they were free from the constraints of government (e.g., Bale 2012; Gauja 2016). The mere presence of strategic motivators, however, is not sufficient to explain party adaptation, which leaves underexplored why some parties, like Germany’s CDU, changed relatively quickly after a defeat, whereas others, like Austria’s People’s Party, required four or more consecutive election defeats to do so or, like Italy’s DC, did not pass any meaningful reform. Although Sartori (1966, 1976) suggested that the presence of strong antisystem parties to the left and right might restrict centrist parties to pursuing very similar positions and coalitions, his work is more about the vulnerability of democracy than of political parties. Even when facing bipolar opposition, parties can decide—and in fact have decided—to realign their platform (Capoccia 2005).

Why do some parties fail to adapt or do so only with a significant delay even when facing strategic incentives for reform? A prominent approach has focused on the institutional constraints on party leaders’ autonomy. There are good reasons to expect party leaders to be among the most reform-friendly actors within political parties as they face the immediate pressure to perform well at the next election or be replaced (Lupu 2016, 32). In contrast, conventional wisdom dating back to John May’s (1973) special law of curvilinear disparity suggests that giving too much power to lower-rank party elites and members would hinder reform because they tend to be more committed to the party’s traditional positions.⁴ Wiliarty (2010, 2) has thus rightly outlined that party adaptation is usually associated with an organization that disempowers members and empowers party leaders. Centralizing power in the hands of leaders or preventing the routinization and entrenchment of vertical accountability mechanisms to begin with has thus often been seen as essential for adaptive reforms (Kirchheimer 1966; Kitschelt 1994; Levitsky 2003; Ziblatt 2017).

The leadership autonomy argument focuses on party adaptation against party activists, but Sarah Wiliarty (2010) and others have emphasized a path toward adapting with party activists, which serves as the starting point for this book’s argument. This line of argument stresses political parties’ collective nature, as parties typically bring together people with different political preferences. The individuals coming together in the same party often form, join, or are sorted into groups within their party because they live in the same part of the country, come from the same sociodemographic background, or uphold similar political views.⁵ Such intraparty groups, like local party branches (Bentancur, Rodríguez, and Rosenblatt 2020; Ellinas 2020), women’s associations (Wiliarty 2010), and legislative caucuses and factions (Bloch Rubin 2017; DiSalvo 2012), have played a key role in party adaptation by helping parties identify and aggregate important preferences. However, not all internal organizations are equally useful for party adaptation. Although forming special groups for particular target constituencies, like women or particular professions, and incorporating them in the party’s decision-making bodies can facilitate incorporating particular interests, Morgan (2011) has warned that formally incorporating special interests into the party’s organizational structure often backfired. Such formally incorporated groups often refuse to let go of their privileged position when their electoral relevance declines. This book shows that party factions, by lacking such formal ties to the central party, provide parties with greater flexibility in incorporating special interests than other types of intraparty groups.

The emergence, development, and persistence of intraparty groups points toward a broader puzzle around the development of political institutions. Integrating different preferences has been a core challenge for virtually all political parties (Aldrich 1995; Levitsky 2003, 12; Seawright 2012, 23), and parties usually set up specific rules, often referred to as institutions, for this purpose (Panebianco 1988). Initial rules regulating the incorporation of special interests often become deeply entrenched as a result of learning and coordination effects and adaptive expectations, guiding subsequent institutional choices and making setting up new rules increasingly costly (Anria 2019; Bentancur, Rodríguez, and Rosenblatt 2020; compare Pierson 2000a, 253–54). Actors who refuse to play by these rules risk being gradually marginalized even in initially unrelated aspects of intraparty politics (Krauss and Pekkanen 2011; compare Page 2006). Adaptive reforms, especially when concerning the privileges of intraparty groups, have been difficult (Hunter 2010), and we should thus see path-reversing change attempts to dissipate over time as actors increasingly endorse the existing rules. This expectation, however, clashes with the frequent pushes for substantive reforms and the changes we observe in many parties (e.g., Faucher 2015; Gauja 2016; Wauters 2014; compare Mahoney and Thelen 2010). While the same territorially based and occupational groups have dominated in Austria’s People’s Party and Venezuela’s Democratic Action Party for decades, Italy’s DC saw the rise and fall of numerous intraparty groups over the fifty years of its existence. In contrast, some intraparty organizations persisted in the CDU, whereas others rose and subsequently declined, and Japan’s Liberal Democrats saw a shift in the internal balance of power from factions to its prefectural branches in the mid- to late 1990s. Institutional approaches can thus be improved by specifying which conditions favor change over stability in the way parties incorporate societal interests and how that influences party adaptation.

This Book’s Argument and Main Contributions

To make such a contribution, this book combines recent work on factionalism with a historical-institutionalist analysis of party organizations to explain the extent to which and how quickly parties adopt adaptive reforms. Its main argument advances in three steps.

First, factions, while sometimes vilified, differ from other types of intraparty organizations in important ways that can enhance party adaptation by providing the flexibility for old interests to decline and new interests to rise within political parties. Parties’ organizations are composed of vertical and horizontal levels, which include their membership associations, national headquarters, and representation in public office (Eldersveld 1964; Katz and Mair 1993). Factions facilitate connecting party elites and members across party levels, in contrast to parties’ territorial branches (e.g., in specific regions or provinces) or legislative camps or caucuses, which are, by design, much more limited in this regard. Their organizational pervasiveness supports the integration of social and political groups by connecting actors across different branches of the party. Moreover, unlike the auxiliary organizations that parties often include for young people, women, or different occupational or ethnic groups, factions are neither set up nor sanctioned by the party but depend only on the alliances party elites are able and willing to forge. Their flexibility supports innovation by giving a platform to new or previously minor groups. They can thus facilitate adaptation by supporting elite renewal, incorporating new grievances, and building coalitions around new policy positions.⁶ However, a proliferation of factions is likely to undermine the party’s internal gatekeeping mechanisms and lead to more and more groups seeking to influence decisions.⁷ The relationship between the level of factionalism and party adaptation is thus likely to be inverted U-shaped. Very high and very low levels of factionalism hinder party adaptation, whereas a moderate level of factionalism supports adaptation. The level of factionalism refers to the extent to which factions rather than other types of groups, like local party branches or auxiliary organizations, dominate the party’s internal decision-making. The number of factions and the share of members of party assemblies, the cabinet, and the legislature who belong to a faction allow capturing this.

Second, parties’ early organizational choices importantly shape their subsequent level of factionalism. The literature on the causes of differences in factionalism has been notoriously fragmented and often focused on country-level factors like the electoral system (see chapter 2). By formulating observable expectations for different institutional, structural, and cultural variables and carefully tracing at which stage in the causal process they play a role, the book highlights the fact that a party’s initial internal institutions have a notable effect on party elites’ decision to form and join factions rather than relying on other types of intraparty organizations. Among the many choices party elites make when forming their organization, a party’s initial set of rules to select its national leaders is likely to be particularly important for its subsequent level of factionalism because those rules affect which type of internal groups party elites are likely to rely on to assume leadership positions. This book shows that this logic goes beyond the selection of the individual party leader. The more leadership positions, including the party secretary and other members of its leadership board, are elected by a central assembly that brings together delegates from different organizational branches of the party, the more important alliances between elites from different party branches and the higher the level of factionalism will be.

Third, changing a party’s level of factionalism is often difficult because it can leave key decision-makers in a dilemma. Failing to adapt to a changed environment often entails electoral decline or even collapse and thus threatens party elites’ political career. We would therefore expect that party elites, in order to protect their career, seek changes within the party that moderate levels of factionalism. However, actors with the power to promote such reforms are likely to have benefited from the party’s level of factionalism. That level of factionalism is likely to become deeply entrenched within the party as party elites try to strengthen their own internal networks through campaigning, clientelism, and changes to the party’s organization. Parties with very high and very low levels of factionalism thus provide their elites with conflicting incentives. Factionalism’s effects on party adaptation is negative, but its effect on the elites’ holding party leadership positions has been positive. In such cases, changing the level of factionalism will not be impossible but difficult. In contrast, party elites in moderately factionalized parties do not face this dilemma because the effects of moderate factionalism on both their prospects of holding leadership positions and party adaptation are positive. Chapter 2 provides the microfoundations for the origins, development, and effects of different levels of factionalism on party adaptation and contrasts the argument with competing explanations. This three-step argument is based on two scope conditions. Political parties need to allow for internal competition and have formal rules that regulate the selection of the party leadership. Personalistic parties in which the party leader can simply bypass internal rules as well as communist, sectarian, and other parties that suppress intraparty pluralism are therefore not part of my universe of cases.

By analyzing how factionalism can create incentives for both organizational change and stability and how that affects party adaptation, this book makes a novel contribution to the study of political parties and institutional development. It is the first systematic look at the development and effects of different levels of factionalism on parties’ ability to adapt to a transformed environment. It integrates insights into party change, organization, and factionalism with recent advances in the study of political institutions. This book shows that variation in factionalism explains why election defeats, public scandals, and changes in a party’s dominant internal coalition do not unequivocally propel reform. It contributes to the party change and party organization literature by highlighting the effect of factions, in contrast to other types of intraparty groups, on parties’ ability to integrate special interests and innovate traditional positions and structures. By demonstrating a relationship between the level of factionalism and party adaptation that has an inverted U shape, the book mediates between DiSalvo’s (2012) view of factions as important engines of change and Boucek’s (2012) and Ceron’s (2019) findings that factions can block change.

The book also contributes to insights into the value of resources for party adaptation. Cyr (2017) has shown how parties can use their organizational and ideational resources to cope with environmental transformations. By focusing on the varying trajectory of parties with a well-developed ideological brand and organization, the book shows that a party’s level of factionalism crucially influences its ability to capitalize on available resources to adapt to a changing environment. It also plays an important role in explaining whether a party is able to transform its ideological brand, something Lupu (2016) has shown to be highly relevant for a party’s trajectory.

Moreover, this book seeks to contribute to overcoming the strange fragmentation of the study of party politics. Research on party change and organization has traditionally been divided into studies on so-called advanced industrial democracies (e.g., Bale 2012; Gauja 2016; Kitschelt 1994), on the one hand, and so-called developing democracies, on the other hand (e.g., Bentancur, Rodríguez, and Rosenblatt 2020; Cyr 2017; Hunter 2010; Morgan 2011). Differences in party competition in different parts of the world certainly continue to exist. However, several parties in, for example, Latin America, have shown to be highly adaptable (e.g., Bentancur, Rodríguez, and Rosenblatt 2020; Hunter 2010; Levitsky 2003), whereas the more recent decline of many old parties has reinforced doubts over European parties’ adaptability (e.g., Przeworski 2019; Zielonka 2018). Dividing the field along geographical lines has thus become highly debatable, and the book shows how drawing on insights developed in the study of Latin American politics importantly enhances our understanding of the varying adaptation of parties in Europe.

Finally, the book integrates recent advances in the study of institutional development with the literature on party organization to address a theoretical paradox. Previous books have drawn on path dependence, positive feedback effects, and negative externalities to explain why the same type of intraparty groups have often persisted within political parties (Anria 2019; Bentancur, Rodríguez, and Rosenblatt 2020; Krauss and Pekkanen 2011). If positive feedback effects or negative externalities explained why factions persisted in some parties and were absent in others, we would expect attempts to change the level of factionalism to dissipate over time as more and more actors adapt to the practices in place. This view, however, does not account for the frequent reform attempts and some parties’ departures from traditionally dominant internal groups (e.g., Faucher 2015; Wauters 2014). In contrast, the scholarship on incremental institutional change would expect actors to pass reforms that would change the incentives to form or join factions if the current level of factionalism does not correspond to contextual demands (Greif 2006; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). This book bridges the party organization literature’s focus on path dependence and the literature on incremental institutional change to account for political parties’ organizational stability and change when under pressure to adapt.

Cases and Methodology

Empirically, a key challenge in evaluating different explanations for party adaptation is that the changes to which parties need to adapt are highly context dependent (e.g., Cyr 2017, 65; Gauja 2016, 16; Levitsky 2003, 9; Morgan 2011, 51). For instance, differences across party families influence what constitutes pressure for parties to adapt and the range of options available to them. The decline of religion as a driver of political behavior in Europe has been a key challenge to Christian democratic parties, while representing an opportunity for center-left and radical-right parties to infringe upon Christian Democracy’s labor and national-conservative constituencies. In turn, Christian democratic parties’ cross-class catch-all appeal has typically provided various potential directions for reform (Frey 2009), whereas left-wing parties’ working-class history has usually limited them in the extent to which they could, for instance, introduce austerity measures in response to economic crises.⁸ Consequently, identifying and tracing the changes to