Inter-Factional Conflicts and Government Formation. Do Party Leaders Sort Out Ideological Heterogeneity?

Although a large branch of the literature takes parties as monolithic actors, we know that they are teams composed by a variety of subgroups. Hence we consider the party as a coalition of factions that must overcome collective action problems. On the one hand, factions compete to maximize their share of payoffs, while on the other they need to cooperate preserving unity, which is a public good. To deal with this conflict the party select a leader who is in charge of organizing the subgroups in order to produce the public good. Inter-factional conflict and ideological heterogeneity may affect coalition formation, delaying the duration of bargaining over cabinet formation or jeopardizing party’s chances of getting into government. Through a new dataset, constructed applying modern techniques of quantitative text analysis to motions presented by factions during party congresses, we estimated the ideological heterogeneity of Italian parties, from 1946 to 2010. These data have been used to assess how internal polarization affects the length of government formation and damages the party’s likelihood of being involved in the negotiation. The impact of inter-factional conflict has been investigated in interaction with intra-party rules. In fact, contrasting modes of party organization may alter the degree of autonomy of the leader and its ability to solve factional disputes related to intra-party portfolio allocation or to the governments’ policy platform. In this perspective, autonomous leaders may reduce the negative effect of factional heterogeneity during the bargaining over government formation.