Party Congress Conflict as Prelude to Party Splits?

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.