DFG Project - How Mainstream Parties Deal with Conflict: Rules, Practices, Media Exposure

​​This project studies intra-party conflict regulation in eight major mainstream parties across four multilevel democracies in Europe (Austria: SPÖ, ÖVP; Germany: CDU, SPD; UK: Labour, Conservatives; Spain: PP, PSOE) between 1982 and 2025. Intra-party conflict regulation refers to situations in which a party employs one of its formal conflict regulation procedures, defined by formal rules in the party’s statutes and designed to address expressed disagreement that cannot be resolved informally. Specifically, this project addresses the following questions: 

What formal measures do parties have at their disposal to address conflict?

What are major drivers for the choice of measure in different conflict situations with different media exposure?

These questions are highly salient, as large mainstream parties in many European democracies have experienced major upheaval in recent years, triggering severe intra-organizational frictions. Managing intra-organizational conflicts is crucial for parties, as these conflicts affect their ability to fulfil central democratic functions. In the societal arena, they can erode parties’ support base and weaken their ties to citizens. In the electoral arena, they hamper parties’ prospects of entering parliament. Once in parliament, they negatively affect their ability to function as an effective opposition. Finally, in the governmental arena, they hinder parties’ capacity to serve as reliable coalition partners and effective governors. Despite these wide-ranging repercussions, there is little comparative research on day-to-day conflict regulation in major mainstream parties that theorizes and analyses both the evolving repertoires of conflict regulation procedures in parties’ own rules and actual practices of rule application, practices that are shaped not only by the nature of conflict cases, but also by whether or not the media transfer the latter into the public domain.

To close this gap, the project applies a multidimensional framework to study intra-party conflict regulation. It employs a multi-methods design, combining document analysis to examine the evolution of conflict regulation procedures in party statutes with media content analysis to assess how the eight parties use them to deal with intra-party conflict ‘in the public eye’. Lastly, zooming in on the two German parties, the project assesses whether and how the conflict cases decided by their national party tribunals are covered by the national media. This will allow a comparison of the handling of publicly salient conflict cases with those that remained internal matters.