Intra-party negativity and criticism of party leaders in Italy

The literature on party politics and election campaigns has widely investigated the incentives for negative campaigning in inter-party competition. However, the dynamics of intra-party negativity within political parties received lower attention. The present paper tries to fill this gap by investigating the determinants of negative campaign and the level of criticism toward the party leader enacted by politicians during party meetings. Some scholars investigated the level of negativity in party leaders' speeches delivered during internal party meetings, while other studies focused on social media proved that attacks against their own leaders are stronger when the policy preferences of politicians diverge from those of the leadership. In view of that, we will dig into the causes of such negative campaign paying attention to both policy, office and electoral incentives that might motivate politicians to attack their leaders. More in detail, we will investigate the effect of electoral performances, cabinet membership, gender, age, political experience and career stages, ideological heterogeneity, leaders' ambiguity and party institutionalization. The hypotheses will be tested taking advantage of a new dataset build by transcribing more than 7,615 speeches delivered by politicians during 107 congresses of Italian parties from 1979 to 2019.