The Study of Intra-Party Friction: A Conceptual Assessment of Preference Heterogeneity, Disagreement, and Conflict

With the expansion of data sources and methods in recent years, intra-party conflict has started to receive more and more scholarly attention from a diverse set of fields, such as legislative studies (e.g., Gianetti and Benoit 2009; Pedersen 2010; Bäck et al. 2016), electoral behaviour (e.g., Green and Haber 2015; Plescia et al. 2021; Pyeatt 2015), and party politics (e.g., Ceron 2012; Ibenskas and Sikk 2019; Cross and Katz 2013). Yet despite a growing scholarly interest in intra-party conflict, it seems hard to pin down what ‘intra-party conflict’ exactly is, one reason being that the literature tends to approach the phenomenon from a ‘family resemblance perspective’ in terms of a various, overlapping but not equivalent notions (e.g. dissent, heterogeneity, cohesion) that capture aspects related to a broad notion of intra-party conflict, none necessarily sufficient for intra-party conflict to become empirically manifest. Building on such research but taking a different conceptual approach, we propose an operational definition of intra-party conflict as empirical feature of internal party life that requires four conditions to emerge: 1) the interaction of at least two intra-party actors 2) preference heterogeneity between those actors 3) that directly relate to the party as organization or to the relevant actors’ belonging to the party and 4) that is articulated by at least two of the actors involved leading to a division within the organization. Based on this definition, we review the academic literature and show that academic research can be organized along two axes: first, intra-party conflict tends to align with one of two alternative perspectives on intra-party conflict– a structural and a behavioural one – each tending towards different assumptions about the nature and sources of conflict within political parties; second existing literature diverges on whether intra-party conflict is approached as a problem that needs to be avoided or at least managed and as a potential benefit that might be exploited.