How Mainstream Parties Deal with Conflict: Rules, Practices, Media Exposure

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Nicole Bolleyer; Privatdozent Dr. Martin Gross
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546065227

The project deals with intra-party conflict regulation, referring to measures taken by party organizations to manage divergent preferences within the party in a way that avoids open conflicts or at least reduces them to a level that does not significantly impact the party's organizational capability. The project addresses the following questions: How do major parties regulate internal conflict? More specifically, what formal measures do they have at their disposal to address conflict and what are major drivers for the choice of measure in different conflict situations with different media exposure. These questions are crucial for parties because internal organizational conflicts and their regulation fundamentally affect the ability of political parties to fulfill central democratic functions: in the societal arena, these conflicts undermine the support of the constituency and weaken connections to citizens; in the electoral arena, they affect the parties' prospects of entering parliament, which in turn has a negative impact on the parties' ability to effectively engage in opposition work; in the governmental arena, they complicate both effective governance and the consideration of parties as reliable coalition partners. Despite these impacts, there is limited theory-driven, cross-national research on everyday conflict regulation in major parties, exploring formal regulations, the application of conflict resolution mechanisms, and the influence of media coverage on intra-party conflict resolution. To address this gap, the project will apply a new, multidimensional approach to the analysis of intra-party conflict regulation, simultaneously considering all three dimensions and testing it through a cross-national, mixed-methods research design. To achieve this, intra-party conflict regulations in eight mainstream parties in four European multi-level systems between 1982 and 2023 will be analyzed (Germany, Austria, Spain, United Kingdom). We will combine document analyses to examine formally established rules in party statutes with national and subnational media content analyses of the application of these measures. The examined parties each include the major "left" and "right" party in the countries (which tend to adopt different measures) and faced different institutional changes and issues during the analysis period. The differences within and between countries maximize the diversity of discernible conflict resolution patterns among the eight parties. This, in turn, allows us to gain broader insights into how major parties in advanced democracies handle conflicts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Patricia Correa