A New Typology of Intra-Party Groups

Across the globe, political parties rely on a diversity of internal groups to integrate and aggregate different views. Previous scholarship has established that factions, tendencies, youth and women’s movements, as well as subnational and legislative party branches affect parties’ programmatic positions, vote share, portfolio allocation, and organizational integrity as well as government stability and even party system change. However, a clear-cut conceptualization to differentiate between them has been missing. The lack of a conceptualization of intra-party groups entails problems for comparative research. Most recent studies of intra-party politics have defined their unit of analysis as relatively cohesive groups that pursue joint political goals within a political party. However, such a conceptualization risks leaving us blind for the diversity of intra-party groups. Veritable ‘miniature parties’ operated within the Japanese LDP, the Australian Labor Party, and the Italian Christian Democrats, while other parties have mainly seen loosely organized networks. Moreover, parties also often include associations for specific social groups, like for young people, women, and workers. Subsuming all these groups under the same concept risks violating unit homogeneity. In turn, restricting our sample to parties that facilitate identifying the same unit of analysis across cases, like highly factionalized parties, risks suffering from selection bias. Other scholars have therefore highlighted conceptual differences that, however, have not allowed unambiguously distinguishing between intra-party groups. This paper conceptualizes intra-party groups along two dimensions, highlighting groups’ varying organizational expansion across party levels and freedom to form without approval of the party authorities. The resulting matrix differentiates between factions, tendencies, ancillary organizations, and territorial and legislative party branches. The typology is more parsimonious than previous work and identifies the dimensions on which intra-party groups actually differ. The paper highlights the empirical value of the new typology by drawing on examples from Europe, North and Latin America, and Asia. It allows coding intra-party groups across countries and over time and reveals important differences between political parties.