Abstract
This paper analyzes how factional conflict and intra-party organization affect a party’s likelihood of being involved in a ruling coalition. We focus on Italian parties (between 1946 and 2013) estimating their internal heterogeneity through quantitative text analysis of policy documents presented by factions during party congresses. The impact of inter-factional conflict has been investigated in interaction with intra-party rules showing that when the party leader is autonomous and can rely on powerful whipping resources to impose discipline, the party will credibly sticks to the coalition agreement, thereby reducing the negative effect of factional heterogeneity in coalition bargaining.
Keywords
Introduction
Several scholars have analyzed the process of government formation to determine who gets into office and to predict which cabinet will form (Bäck and Dumont, 2008; Baron and Ferejohn, 1989; Isaksson, 2005; Laver and Schofield, 1990; Laver and Shepsle, 1996; Martin and Stevenson, 2001; Strøm, 1994). Only few works, however, deepen the analysis of government formation going beyond the unitary actor assumption (Bäck, 2008, 2009; Ceron, 2014; Debus and Bräuninger, 2009; Kam et al., 2010; Laver and Shepsle, 1990; Mershon, 2001; Meyer, 2012).
We know that factionalism and intra-party dissent are a matter of fact in many parties and political systems (Ceron, 2012a; Greene and Haber, 2014; Harmel et al., 1995; Meyer, 2012; Schumacher, 2012). Intra-party ideological heterogeneity affects the choice of party platform, party change, policy-making and party unity in parliamentary voting behavior (Budge et al., 2010; Ceron, 2012a, 2013a; Harmel and Tan, 2003; König, 2006). Relaxing the unitary actor assumption can also help analyze coalition governments (Giannetti and Benoit, 2009). Given that political parties are composed of a variety of subgroups retaining different policy preferences and contrasting political ambitions, the role of intra-party politics in the bargaining process should be taken into account. This is particularly relevant insofar as internal conflicts and divergences over (factional) portfolio allocation (Ceron, 2014; Mershon, 2001) or the policy programme to be realized by the ruling coalition can delay government formation (Mershon, 1994) or damage cabinet stability (Giannetti, 2010).
Linking hierarchical models of coalition bargaining with the principal-agent literature, this work investigates the process of government formation and aims at analyzing the conditional effect of intra-party division and internal rules (i.e. centralized decision-making) on a party’s likelihood of getting office.
Factionalism and intra-party equilibriums are particularly relevant to the process of government formation in the Italian case (Curini and Martelli, 2009), where governments are created and defeated due to the rivalries between internal party factions (Giannetti, 2010). Accordingly, we collect data on the factional structure of Italian parties from 1946 to 2013. By analyzing debates held during party congresses, we will assess intra-party heterogeneity, measured through quantitative text analysis of policy motions presented by party factions. In addition, we will take account of the size of each subgroup as well as intra-party rules such as the degree of leader autonomy and the centralization of the candidate selection mechanisms.
The empirical analysis confirms our hypotheses and reveals that centralized decision-making cancels out the negative effect of intra-party ideological heterogeneity by solving problems of credible commitment and reducing the transaction costs.
The next section illustrates the literature on the effect of intra-party politics on government formation and raises some hypotheses. Section 2 maps intra-party divisions within Italian parties. Section 3 discusses the relevance of contrasting intra-party rules and organizational structures. Sections 4 and 5 present the results of the analysis and draw conclusions.
1. Literature and hypotheses
The effect of intra-party disputes on government negotiations has been analyzed focusing on two aspects: party cohesion and factionalization on the one side, and intra-party democracy on the other. Groennings (1970) was the first to investigate this topic stating that parties weakened by factional strife face disadvantages in coalition bargaining. However, when intra-party disputes happen, centralized decision-making processes allow parties to bypass the conflict and keep office. Other authors emphasize the positive effect of party unity on office payoffs (e.g. Baron, 1998). More recently, Bäck (2009) shows that the level of factionalization, i.e. the existence of intra-party subgroups that hold heterogeneous policy positions, has negative effects on a party’s chances of getting into government.
Other works emphasize the impact of intra-party organization. Strøm (1990) claims that decentralized intra-party decision-making increases the role of party activists, which are notably more policy-oriented and less willing to compromise. By decreasing policy flexibility, decentralized decision-making structures complicate negotiations. Similarly, other works suggest that strongly democratic rules damages the party’s chances to get into office (Bäck, 2009; Müller and Strøm, 2000; Warwick, 1996) while unconstrained negotiators tend to be more often involved in coalition accommodations than parties with a strong organization (Pedersen, 2010). According to Pedersen (2010: 750), in fact, ‘parties with strong national party organs are more inclined to stick to policy ideals, making them less attractive and flexible in inter-party negotiations’. Conversely, Maor (1995, 1998) points out that decentralized parties are able to handle factional struggles, whereas in centralized parties the conflict produces public quarrels and party fissions, and these public disputes are more damaging to the bargaining power of parties than internal (private) dissent.
Here we contend that intra-party fragmentation and polarization or excessive levels of internal democracy can foster an increase in transaction costs, during the bargaining over government formation (Bäck, 2003; Bäck and Dumont, 2007). This may slow down the decision-making process wielding a twofold negative effect. On the one side, factionalism will raise bargaining costs within the party due to the need to reach an equilibrium between different subgroups; on the other, inter-party bargaining will be influenced by the output of the intra-party game: when dealing with changing and unstable internal equilibriums, coalition partners will face higher transactions costs to negotiate and enforce an agreement.
Beside transaction costs, intra-party heterogeneity and factional strife carry out problems of credible commitment in the negotiation. If the party is composed by subgroups retaining heterogeneous policy views it will be harder for it to reach an agreement behind which all party factions will unify. As such, potential partners are not able to identify a clear stance supported by this party. Even after an equilibrium is reached (in both arenas) the party may be not able to guarantee that the factions will comply and stick to that (Bäck and Vernby, 2003). Factionalism and internal fragmentation also increase the number of veto players. In addition, decentralized and unrestricted decision mechanisms tend to promote instability of the outcome. As a consequence, party unity in roll call votes can be negatively affected and government effectiveness damaged.
In light of this, we build a bridge between hierarchical (Laver, 1999) and delegation (Strøm, 2001, 2003) models of coalition bargaining. Following the ‘whipping game’ proposed by Laver (1999) we analyze government formation as a nested game. The final outcome (e.g. government formation), and the respective payoffs for the actors involved, depend on the output of a bargaining process involving multiple stages. This process goes back and forth between the intra-party and the inter-party rounds of negotiation. Taking our cue from Strøm (2001), in the first stage we contend that party leaders are the agents of their organizations, whose activists and members elected in central office are the principals.
In the first stage the party body assigns to the leader a mandate to bargain with potential partners. The boundaries stated in the mandate depend on intra-party policy heterogeneity (Warwick, 2000, 2005), while the tightness of such boundaries is affected by internal rules related to intra-party democracy and centralization. The mandate itself impinges on the autonomy of the negotiator (party leader) and on the outcome of the negotiation process given that tight boundaries imply lower flexibility and decrease party desirability as a coalition partner decreasing its chances to get into office. If the party leader reaches a compromise to form a coalition, in the next stage this agreement should be accepted and approved by the party body.
Then the leader is responsible for its enforcement. Enforcing the agreement, in turn, requires either strong ideological cohesion over the outcome of the compromise or powerful whipping resources that the leader can employ, forcing recalcitrant MPs to comply. The likelihood that the party will stick to the agreement can be discounted during the inter-party bargaining that takes place in the previous stage. Accordingly, it affects the outcome of the negotiation and the probability that the party will enter the government. 1
Following previous studies we distinguish two main features of intra-party politics, i.e. preferences and rules, that can damage or advantage the party in coalition formation. Although the literature has discussed the role of factionalism and intra-party democracy as related to each other (e.g. Groennings, 1970; Maor, 1998), so far no empirical analysis has managed to test the conditional effect of internal policy heterogeneity and intra-party rules. 2 In line with our theoretical framework, however, we claim that the effect of divergent factional preferences interacts with internal rules insofar as autonomous leaders, or leaders with powerful whipping resources, can be able to solve credible commitment problems and reduce transaction costs. If party factions are heterogeneous veto players undermining party desirability in the negotiation, we hypothesize that autonomous leaders can override the veto, while centralized candidate selection mechanisms provide powerful whipping resources preventing factions from using it.
H1: Intra-party division negatively affects a party’s likelihood of being involved in coalition governments, but this effect is lower in parties ruled by unconstrained and autonomous leaders.
H2: Intra-party division negatively affects a party’s likelihood of being involved in coalition governments, but this effect is lower in centralized parties whose leaders can rely on powerful whipping resources to enforce compliance.
2. Intra-party conflict in factionalized parties
To analyze the impact of intra-party conflict on government formation we need to measure internal heterogeneity and evaluate the degree of intra-party division. Our focus is on factionalized parties composed of a variety of more or less organized subgroups (factions) that play a formal role in intra-party dynamics. Since in factionalized parties divisions and conflicts are often publicly observable, we can exploit ‘hard data’ and official party documents to assess the level of disagreement and policy heterogeneity within these parties. For this reason, we focus on the Italian case, which is a benchmark of factional politics, and analyze data from party congress, i.e. the arena in which inter-factional conflict and bargaining take place. 3
Beside the availability of information about factional conflicts, the Italian case is also suitable for other reasons. In particular, the high instability rate of Italian cabinets allows assessment of the dynamics of the party system on a nearly annual basis, tracking changes in alliances, party strength and policy positions. In addition, it allows measurement of the effect of intra-party struggles on government formation opportunities that are temporally close to the party congress debates (see below).
In divided parties, factions compete to win members’ votes and present a list of candidates attached to a policy ‘motion’, which is an omni-comprehensive policy document that aims to shape party position and strategy. The motions presented by rival party factions express their contrasting views on the ideological direction of the party (Giannetti and Laver, 2009). During the party congress, factional delegates elected by party members select the party body (a small committee in charge of running the party until the next congress) and, directly or indirectly, the party leader. After a public debate, delegates also define the party line and ideological position that the leadership should pursue (Levy, 2004).
In a congress motion factions are (almost) completely free to present their view on party platform; the analysis of party congresses allows mapping of the intra-party structure measuring the heterogeneous policy preferences of each group as well as their respective strength in party body. 4 Given that ‘content analysis on texts drafted by […] intra-party groups seem to be the best choice to identify their respective preferences’ (Benoit et al., 2009: 443), here we will analyze congress motions to evaluate a party’s internal polarization. Factions’ policy positions have been extracted from policy motions through Wordfish (Slapin and Proksch, 2008; Proksch and Slapin, 2009), 5 an automated scaling model that, by analyzing the frequencies of all words contained in a text document, allows assessment of its position. Wordfish assigns to each word a value β, which is called a ‘discriminating parameter’ and enables distinguishing of terms located on the extremes of a latent scale. 6 Then, according to the discriminating power of each word, Wordfish extracts the policy position of textual documents scaling them along a single dimension whose meaning has to be interpreted ex-post and depends on the content of documents analyzed. Given that motions are omni-comprehensive ideological documents covering a wide range of policies, the latent dimension can be interpreted as a traditional left-right scale.
Overall, we analyzed 258 factional motions related to 84 congresses held by Italian parties between 1946 and 2013. 7 In each party congress, factions are properly arrayed from left to right and the wings tend to retain positions statistically different from that of party mainstream (this happens in the 96% of congresses included in the analysis). Furthermore we observe a strong and positive correlation between the position of the median faction and several external measures of party position drawn from expert surveys (r = 0.8) or Comparative Manifesto Project data (r = 0.7). 8
Since these estimates are valid and reliable, we use them to create an index of Intra-Party Division (IPD) built adapting the concept of ‘ideological standard deviation’ (Warwick, 1992) to intra-party politics. This index takes into consideration the ideological range of preferences inside the party as well the strength of each subgroup and it has been measured through the following formula: 9
where si is faction i’s share of seats in party body, fi is its policy position and WEP is the Weighted mean of Factions’ Positions; the summations are over the number of factions within each congress (n). 10
3. Intra-party division and party organization
Internal polarization is just one side of the story since we are interested in assessing its impact in interaction with intra-party rules. Previous work on government formation focused mainly on intra-party democracy and the centralization of the decision-making process. These two concepts may also overlap, depending on the criteria adopted to distinguish centralization and decentralization (e.g. Bäck, 2009). Given the lack of a clear definition of centralization (Pedersen, 2010), here we will focus on rules that are directly related to our theoretical framework.
To start with, we contend that flexibility is higher in parties with unconstrained negotiators; hence we want to measure the degree of leader’s autonomy from factional vetoes. Several authors have argued that direct forms of internal democracy are one strategy to enhance the leader’s autonomy. Leaders may empower ordinary party members (or supporters) increasing the nominal level of intra-party democracy as a device to manipulate members for their own ends (Katz, 2001) and to overcome the resistance of middle-level activists and organized factions. Due to aspects like name recognisability and the front runner effect (Kenig, 2009), the direct election made by a wide selectorate produces less tight contests, decreasing competitiveness and representativeness (Rahat et al., 2008) and paving the way to a ‘Bonapartist’ form of intra-party democracy. Indeed, when the internal organization fosters leader’s autonomy the party is no longer bound by factional preferences: autonomous leaders retain more discretion in selecting the party platform and are free to negotiate with other parties and to build cartels (Ceron, 2012b).
Accordingly, we created a dummy variable, Leader Autonomy, distinguishing between leaders directly elected by party members during the party congress (value 1) and those indirectly selected (after the congress) in small committees (value 0) where any single activist can alter the equilibrium keeping the leader tied to factional vetoes. 11 Leaders selected in a small committee, in fact, retain no autonomy and will simply stick to the agreement reached after an inter-factional bargaining (Ceron, 2014). Conversely, leaders selected through a direct election benefit from a stronger legitimacy that gives them more autonomy and flexibility in inter-party negotiations. 12
From mid-1970s, Italian parties started to adopt direct election and to enlarge the selectorate as a device to strengthen the party leader. The Christian Democratic party (DC) switched to direct election in 1976 while the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) set the same rule in 1981. Around 22 percent of the party congresses considered have adopted direct election. Seven out of 13 parties included in the analysis have used this rule at least once, and we can observe variation both across and within parties (see Table 1).
Details on the data analyzed.
If direct election fosters leaders’ autonomy in bargaining, powerful whipping resources increase his/her ability to deal with problems of credible commitment and to enforce the coalition agreement. Whipping resources are related to the candidate selection mechanisms established by party statutes. When centralized mechanisms are in place, the party leader is able to select candidates and can use disciplinary tools to punish rebel MPs, thereby altering the legislator’s behaviour (Shomer, 2011; Sieberer, 2006). As such, centralized candidate selection neutralizes the negative effect of intra-party heterogeneity on party unity in roll call votes (Ceron, 2013a), strengthening government effectiveness. We standardize existing data on candidate selection among Italian parties and create a variable, Centralization, which expresses the degree of centralization in the selection of party candidates. 13 This index ranges from 0 (decentralized selection process) to 10 (centralized mechanisms). The Italian Social Movement (MSI) is the most centralized party, while the DC as well as the Italian Liberal Party (PLI) and the Italian Social Democratic Party (PSDI) in early years, follow decentralized mechanisms of candidate selection (Table 1).
In our analyses we adopt the party congress as the unit of analysis (see below). Given that our estimate of internal division can be measured only if the party holds a contested congress, we include in our dataset the contested congresses related to parliamentary parties. Some congresses are excluded because no coalition bargaining took place in the lapse of time between one congress and the next one. Accordingly, the number of observations drops to 67 contested congresses, which represent almost the 50% of all the congresses (contested or not) held by these parties. Table 1 describes the data included in the analysis. For each parliamentary party, we report the number of congresses considered and provide details on the average value of Intra-Party Division, Centralization as well as on the share of congresses in which the leader was selected through direct election.
Figure 1 and 2 sketch the relation between intra-party rules (Leader Autonomy and Centralization, respectively) and factional heterogeneity. As it emerges from the pictures, these two attributes are linearly independent. Neither Leader Autonomy (–0.0) nor Centralization (–0.1) appear to be statistically correlated with Intra-Party Division.
Leader Autonomy and degree of Intra-Party Division within the parties considered in the analysis.
Level of Centralization of the candidate selection process and degree of Intra-Party Division within the parties considered in the analysis.
In the next section the three variables illustrated so far will be used to test the conditional effect of preferences and rules on the government formation process.
4. Analysis and results
The hypotheses discussed in section 1 will be tested focusing on the effect of factional conflict during party congress debates on the process of government formation that takes place soon after the congress. Thanks to the high instability of Italian cabinets these two events are temporally closer. The time elapsed between each party congress and the formation of a subsequent new cabinet is, on average, 220 days (approximately seven months).
Recent studies model the process of government formation as a discrete choice between potential formation opportunities and analyze them through conditional logit (Bäck and Dumont, 2007; Martin and Stevenson, 2001). The use of this approach, however, is not completely straightforward when testing hypotheses related to the effect of party features on a party’s likelihood of getting office (Bäck, 2009). Since we are interested in analyzing the effect of idiosyncratic party characteristics such as factional heterogeneity and internal rules, the best solution seems to be to adopt parties (or party congresses, like in our study) as the unit of analysis (Bäck, 2009; Warwick, 1996). 14
The binary dependent variable is Cabinet Membership, which takes the value of 1 if the party succeeds in getting into government and the value of 0 otherwise. The main independent variables are the three already described in previous sections, which account for the internal bargaining resources of each party: Intra-Party Division, Leader Autonomy and Centralization. Several works, however, investigated the impact of incumbency on government formation (Bäck and Dumont, 2007; Martin and Stevenson, 2001, 2010; Pedersen, 2010; Warwick, 1996). Transaction costs increase when parties change their coalition partners. These bargaining costs produce inertia and generate an incentive to exploit the well established routines; hence coalition partners would rather keep their cooperation on track. Accordingly, we control whether incumbent parties are advantaged in the negotiations through the dummy variable Incumbent, which is equal to 1 if the party was in office at time t-1, and to 0 if not.
In model 1 we test the interaction between Intra-Party Division and Leader Autonomy; in model 2 we test the interaction between Intra-Party Division and Centralization; in model 3 we pooled both interactions together. 15 In model 4 we replicate model 3 including two additional control variables related to a party’s external bargaining resources, i.e. party size and policy position. Larger parties need a lower number of partners to form a majority, hence they usually face less troubles in coalition bargaining as long as they can negotiate with a lower number of potential allies or with smaller groups. Therefore, party size can indeed affect the likelihood of being involved in coalition governments (e.g. Laver and Shepsle, 1996). We control for this aspect through the variable Party Size, which records the percentage of parliamentary seats of each party. Parties whose policy position is closer to the government ideal point could be more easily involved in the bargaining (Pedersen, 2010). To control this feature we assess parties’ and governments’ positions on the left-right scale according to the Italian Legislative Speeches Dataset (ILSD) (Curini, 2011; Curini and Ceron, 2013; Curini and Martelli, 2009). Then we create the variable Distance, measuring the divergence between party i’s and government j’s ideal points. 16
Data have been analyzed through logistic regression. Since observations are nested within parties we provide robust standard errors clustered by party to avoid possible problems from non-independent observations or non-constant variances. 17 Whenever a party fission occurred after the congress (Ceron, 2013b), the value of the independent variables has been adjusted to take account of the actual factional structure of the party. 18 Table 2 presents the results. 19
Logit regression of Cabinet Membership.
Robust standard errors clustered by Party in parentheses. ***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1.
The results seem to confirm our hypotheses. The coefficients of the interactions between factionalism and intra-party rules are positive and statistically significant in all the models. In line with H1, the negative effect of IPD on the likelihood of being involved in a government disappeared when the party is ruled by an autonomous leader that can get rid of factional constraints. As shown in Figure 3, based on model 4, the marginal effect of IPD is negative (–0.642) and statistically significant only when the party is ruled by leaders who retain no autonomy. Conversely, Intra-Party Division is no longer damaging to the party when leaders are autonomous: the marginal effect (0.251) is not statistically different from zero. All else being equal, an increase in IPD by one standard deviation from its mean is 16.6% less damaging if the party is ruled by an autonomous leader.
Marginal effect of Intra-Party Division on Cabinet Membership for autonomous and non autonomous leaders.
Similarly, we notice that the effect of IPD is mitigated by the degree of Centralization (H2). Figure 4, based on model 4, shows that IPD decreases a party’s chances to get into office only when the candidate selection process is decentralized and the party leader does not retain strong whipping resources. Conversely, when Centralization increases, whipping resources are stronger and factional divisions cease to damage the party in the bargaining process. When IPD grows by one standard deviation from the mean, while all the other variables are fixed at their means, the negative impact of Intra-Party Division on the likelihood of being in office is reduced by 17.6% if the party has powerful whipping resources (i.e. if the degree of Centralization increases by one standard deviation from the mean).
Marginal effect of Intra-Party Division on Cabinet Membership according to different levels of Centralization of the candidate selection process.
When it comes to the control variables, we observe that, in line with previous studies (e.g. Warwick, 1996), the incumbent party has a strong advantage in the process of government formation and the probability of entering the cabinet again grows by 68%. With respect to the external bargaining resources, a party’s position and its seats share impinge on the process of government formation. Party Size is positive, meaning that larger parties are more likely to be involved in the negotiation. Distance is negative: the probability of entering the cabinet is lower for parties whose policy position lies far away from the ideal point of the government. 20 An increase in Party Size by one standard deviation from the mean enhances the probability of getting office by 24.6%, while a similar change in Distance lowers this likelihood by 17.5%.
5. Discussion
Going beyond the unitary actor assumption, the present paper investigates the process of government formation taking into account the effect of intra-party ideological heterogeneity under different internal rules. In order to evaluate the degree of internal conflict, the factional structure of Italian parties (1946–2013) has been mapped and intra-party heterogeneity has been measured by applying a technique of quantitative text analysis to documents (motions) presented by factions during party congress debates.
These data have been used to test hypotheses on the conditional effect of factionalism. Building a bridge between hierarchical and delegation models of coalition bargaining, we contend that factionalized parties are disadvantaged in the process of government formation due to increasing transaction costs and higher problems of credible commitment. However, different intra-party rules may erase obstacles related to ideological heterogeneity. On the one hand, the direct election of party leaders increases their legitimacy and autonomy from factional constraints. This lowers transaction costs and allows leaders to set the most suitable party platform in order to reach a coalition agreement, build cartels and get into office (Ceron, 2012b). On the other hand, centralized mechanisms of candidate selection strengthen the whipping resources available to party leaders allowing them to solve problems of credible commitment and enforce the coalition agreement (Ceron, 2013a).
The empirical analysis confirms this theoretical framework. Previous studies (e.g. Bäck, 2008, 2009) suggest that factionalism and intra-party democracy jeopardize a party’s chances of getting into government. Our findings show that these two features are damaging when they interact together.
In fact, our results support the Groennings (1970) argument, stating that factionalized parties are less likely to be in office the higher the level of decentralization of intra-party decision-making. Conversely, party leaders that are autonomous in the decision-making process or can adopt a powerful whip to achieve compliance of rebel MPs are more able to handle internal disputes so that factional conflict is no longer harmful for the party.
Various reasons can explain why centralized decision-making halts the negative effect of ideological heterogeneity. First, autonomous leaders can solve factional disputes related to the distribution of cabinet spoils. For instance, through portfolio allocation they compensate minority factions that are reluctant to form a coalition with partners that retain a divergent policy position. 21 Strategic portfolio allocation then can balance their lower amount of policy payoffs (Ceron, 2014; Warwick, 1998). Secondly, autonomous leaders are free from factional ties in the choice of party platform (Ceron, 2012b). In line with the ‘cartel party’ theory (Katz and Mair, 1995), autonomous leaders can shift the party position to build cross-party cartels and will be more successful in bargaining a coalition deal. As a third point, in factionalized parties the centralized selection of MPs strengthens the party whip and increases party unity in parliamentary votes (Ceron, 2013a) thereby solving the problem of credible commitment during the negotiations and fostering government effectiveness afterward. Whether factional disputes concern portfolio allocation or the programme of the coalition government, centralized parties provide their leaders with proper tools to handle the conflict.
The present study has some limitations. First, we examine the Italian case only. Although this case is a benchmark to study factional politics and our choice is suitable for several reasons related to data collection (availability of data on party factions and closeness between congresses and coalition formation), it could be argued that focusing on the Italian case alone is not the most conservative way to properly test our hypotheses, which can be more easily confirmed due to case selection. Second, we only focus on factionalized parties, meaning those that hold contested congresses. These two aspects can raise doubts on the generalizability of our findings. Notwithstanding this, the Italian case has repeatedly been used as a political laboratory to test hypotheses (Giannetti and Grofman, 2011). Moreover, in a context in which factionalism is the norm (and therefore it could be argued that it is not damaging, or uniformly damaging for all factionalized parties), we observe that higher internal division makes the difference: among divided parties, the least factionalized are more likely to get into office and the negative effect of intra-party division can only be limited by internal rules that centralize the decision-making process and the selection of candidates. In light of this, it is likely that our findings could extend to other political systems characterized by heterogeneous intra-party preferences.
Nevertheless, future research could pursue a comparative perspective to investigate more in depth the conditional effect of factionalism and intra-party rules on the process of coalition formation in other countries in which the inter-party bargaining takes place either before or after the election. 22 A similar research design, in fact, can even be adopted to explain the bargaining process behind the formation of pre-electoral coalitions. Finally, factional heterogeneity and the autonomy of party leaders can affect not only the outcome of government formation but also the duration of such process, altering the time-span of such negotiation (Mershon, 1994). As such, the theoretical framework analyzed herein could be expanded to analyze thoroughly the complexity of the whole process of bargaining over coalition formation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ECPR General Conference (Bordeaux, 4–7 September 2013) and at the MZES Seminar (Mannheim, 25 November 2013). I wish to thank the participants for their useful comments. I also thank Luigi Curini and acknowledge two anonymous Party Politics referees for their helpful remarks.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.