While neither approach fully prevents intra-party conflict or splintering, these findings show how the distinctive characteristics of RLPs are associated with ≠ strategies and instruments for dealing with factionalism.

8/8

These ≠ approaches reflect parties’ origins and political orientation. The Marxism-Leninism of 🇵🇹PCP and 🇪🇸Podemos' populism contributed to their prohibitionist approach to factionalism. 🇵🇹BE and 🇪🇸IU's origins as federations of various parties underpins a permissive one.

7/8

Likewise, the stable cooperation between 🇵🇹BE's main factions contrasts with the less stable internal alliances of the 🇪🇸IU. And despite some formal power-sharing mechanisms, this internal cooperation is largely informal and emerges when there is balance between factions.

6/8

However, these are sustained by very ≠ mechanisms and styles of managing factionalism. E.g., the 🇵🇹PCP’s preemptive prohibitionism seeks to avoid dissent from being organized, while 🇪🇸Podemos has a competitive prohibitionism, using internal votes to settle dissenting views.

5/8

Overall, we find two main approaches towards factionalism: a 'permissive' approach, which allows internal factionalism (🇵🇹BE and 🇪🇸IU); and a 'prohibitionist' approach, which actively fights factionalism (🇵🇹PCP and 🇪🇸Podemos).

4/8

As parties are fairly ‘secretive organizations’, we conducted 26 in-depth interviews with party and faction elites from 4 RLPs (🇪🇸Podemos and IU, 🇵🇹PCP and BE), and analysed party documents and media documents to better understand this.

3/8

Why?
Factionalism is an important element in parties’ internal life, affecting their policies, strategies, electoral performance and even survival. Plus, the stability of new (RLPs) government arrangements (e.g. 🇫🇮🇬🇷🇮🇸🇵🇹🇪🇸) depends on the ‘effective management of factions’.

2/8