Research question/goal:

While the vast majority of scholarly research on multiparty governments conceptualizes political parties as unitary actors, a series of recent empirical studies highlight the pivotal influence of diverging interests within parties throughout the life cycle of democratic governments. Specifically, intra-party heterogeneity affects the formation of governments following parliamentary elections, how government parties then allocate ministerial portfolios, how coalition policies are implemented, and for how long multiparty governments stay in office. The present collaborative project contributes to existing coalition research by exploiting social network sites – most importantly Twitter and Facebook – to construct a large-scale comparative data set on intra-party heterogeneity in European parliamentary democracies over a four-year period.

Based on these unique data, it explores three sets of interrelated research questions. First, the project provides a cross-national comparative perspective on the effect of intra-party heterogeneity on government formation, portfolio allocation, and government termination. Specifically, it investigates how internal rifts influence parties’ ability to get into government, which and how many portfolios different parties and party factions secure, and whether factionalized parties precipitate premature cabinet termination. Second, the data likewise allow for investigating potential institutional and structural determinants of intra-party heterogeneity in European parliamentary democracies. Finally, the project contributes to research on the validity of measures based on social network sites by cross-validating the obtained measures of intra-party heterogeneity with alternative estimates retrieved from various other sources including parliamentary speeches, roll call votes, and survey data (among party elites and their rank and file).

Current stage:

The data collection for the project was completed in 2021. The main focus was on continuing existing manuscripts and exploring the effects of intraparty heterogeneity on party behaviour and voter perceptions of political parties. One manuscript was submitted to an international journal; other manuscripts were presented at the EPSA and the DVPW virtual conferences. Since the project director left the MZES, the project will be continued at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies at the University of Heidelberg.