Political Parties and Coalitional Behaviour in Italy by Geoffrey Pridham

Author:Geoffrey Pridham [Pridham, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135077754
Google: 3s56G2zCqPcC
Goodreads: 18182359
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1988-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The Internal Party Dimension: Elite Control and Elite Constraints

Parallel to the horizontal/vertical dimension in focusing on vertical linkages in coalitional behaviour, this internal party dimension introduces a range of problems that have hardly been considered by coalition theory. And yet the real world of politics demonstrates regularly that the traditional assumption in coalition theory about parties as unitary actors is questionable and cannot be literally true, particularly in a country with strong party factionalism. Relations within party leaderships and between them and their memberships cannot be ignored or taken for granted, if only because divisions may arise in the former case and relevant pressures operate in the latter. While the horizontal/vertical dimension showed that national leaders exercised a strong though not absolute control over their parties' behaviour in sub-national politics, it did not consider how much leaders are influenced by anticipated as well as actual pressures from within their parties and modify their strategies accordingly. The stability of a party's leadership, which must be important when discussing its conduct in coalitional situations, is invariably not static over time and is linked to such considerations. In short, we have to examine the interaction between intra-party and inter-party processes and in doing so to consider not merely formal party structures but also the dynamics of internal party behaviour in general.

Early inductive theory on coalitions has given some attention to this dimension, although not as a consistent theme. Groennings (1970) identified the link between intra-party and inter-party processes in hypothesising that 'coalition membership increases the number of mixed-motive situations faced by top party leaders and increases the intensity of motivational conflicts within each member party's organisation', for 'in addition to party-constituency roles, the leader will take on the roles of representing his party in the coalition and of representing the interests of the coalition at all levels' (1). So far as variation between party structures is concerned, he specified that

the greater the degree of parliamentary party control over the national party decision-making process, the greater is the tendency toward coalition formation at the national level; and the more centralised the party structure, the easier it is for the party to remain in the coalition. The a priori hypothesis that a party weakened by factional dispute will find it difficult to formulate a coalition policy leads quickly to the hypothesis that the greater the organised dissensus within a party, the lesser is the tendency to coalesce, even if the dissensus has nothing to do with coalition policy. It should be noted, furthermore, that it is easier for a party with loose central control to coalesce with another party of the same character than one with tight discipline, because a highly centralised party can present a threat to a loosely structured party (2).

Similarly, Sjoblom (1968) in his study of party strategies in multi-party systems devoted special attention to the 'internal arena' of strategic behaviour given the importance of party cohesion, for weakness in this respect may inhibit a party as coalition actor:

- if lack

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