Party cohesion is an influential factor in terms of parties’ electoral strategies, their performance in competition as well as their behavior in government. In extreme cases, a lack of cohesion might even lead parties to split along the lines of intra-party frictions. While much of the existing literature on party cohesion is confined to the legislative, disagreement and conflict in the wider party organization – although consequential – are often omitted from quantitative studies due to a lack of systematic data. Following a growing strand of research, this paper proposes party congress minutes as data source to derive systematic behavioral data on intra-party conflict. The study applies various text-analytical measures to a novel dataset on party congresses in Austria (1945-2021) and tests their validity based on a subsample of party congresses preceding four cases of party splits in three parties. Specifically, the analysis evaluates a) whether measures of intra-party conflict indicate increased conflict levels just before the splits occurred and b) whether they can be used to delineate the substantive preference divides between rivaling intra-party groups. Short-term changes in party congress conflict are contextualized with data on 167 post-war party congresses in Austria.
