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Parties under Pressure: The Politics of Factions and Party Adaptation

Online ISBN:
9780226830247
Print ISBN:
9780226830230
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Parties under Pressure: The Politics of Factions and Party Adaptation

Matthias Dilling
Matthias Dilling

Assistant Professor

Swansea University
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
7 August 2024
Online ISBN:
9780226830247
Print ISBN:
9780226830230
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Parties under Pressure asks why political parties vary in their ability to pass adaptive reforms when under pressure to update their offer to voters. While adaptation does not equal success, parties’ failure to “move with the times” has often resulted in their decline and even collapse, making room for radical and populist parties and causing concern over liberal democracy’s future. Focusing on the varying fate of Christian Democratic parties—one of Europe’s dominant post-war party families—the book emphasizes the importance of party factions in explaining variation in party adaptation. While often vilified, factions differ from other types of intra-party groups in ways that can enhance party adaptation by providing the flexibility for old interests to decline and new interests to rise within parties, whereas very high factionalism undermines adaptation. The book proposes a comparative framework to study the emergence and development of different levels of factionalism and party adaptation, drawing on insights from the study of party change, party organization, and political institutions. It explains why election defeats, scandals, leadership changes, or high leadership autonomy did not unequivocally propel reforms among Europe’s Christian Democrats, why many of them struggled to escape the shadow of organizational choices taken early in the parties' history, and under what conditions escaping these shadows was possible. Based on extensive archival research and additional in- and out-of-sample tests, Parties under Pressure covers more than 75 years of party development and political history.

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