Party Factions and Candidate Selection

Christine T. Bangum, Jon Fiva, Giovanna M. Invernizzi, Carlo Prato and Janne Tukiainen

No 12087, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study how political parties share power internally by analyzing the allocation of list positions to different factions. We develop a theory of intraparty bargaining in which list positions shape the mobilization efforts of party activists in different factions. Our results allow us to link observable patterns in list allocations to the importance of consensus in intraparty negotiations. We empirically evaluate these predictions using data from Norwegian municipal elections. We exploit a wave of municipal mergers to identify candidates' geography-based factional affiliations. In line with our theory's functionalist logic and consensus-based bargaining, smaller factions are over-compensated in safe list positions. While we also find a slight over-representation in the contested ranks, the relationship between size and resources is much closer to proportionality, as predicted by our theory. Our theoretical and empirical results show that parties can promote consensus among its factions while maintaining mobilization incentives, indicating that equality and efficiency within a political organization can be simultaneously achieved.

Keywords: party factions; intra-party power sharing; candidate selection; geographic representation; municipal mergers. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C78 D72 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12087.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12087

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().