The Politics Within: How Factions Lobby Their Own Parties

Intraparty factionalism is pervasive and factions’ actively shape parties’ decisions for programme, personnel, and general political direction. But what how do factions go about it and why? In this paper, we combine different literatures to argue that factions’ behaviour is bounded by party organizational opportunities and loyalties because they consider both, the potential effectiveness of a lobbying strategy and the electoral harm imposed by it. To test our hypotheses on factions’ use of lobbying strategies, we employ a multi-modal sampling frame, identifying factions operating in 26 parties in Germany, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom and subsequently surveyed active members in these factions (N ~ 4,400). The project bridges literature on intra-party politics and interest group behaviour, contributing new empirical insights into the conditions under which factions choose particular influence strategies and the extent to which these strategies are shaped by party organizational structures.