How Mainstream Parties Deal with Conflict: Rules, Practices, Media Exposure
(The project is funded by the German Research Council (DFG), 01/04/2025 – 31/03/2028)
Summary:
The project deals with intra-party conflict regulation, referring to measures taken by party organizations to manage divergent preferences within the party in a way that avoids open conflicts or at least reduces them to a level that does not significantly impact the party’s organizational capability. The project addresses the following questions: How do major parties regulate internal conflict? More specifically, what formal measures do they have at their disposal to address conflict and what are major drivers for the choice of measure in different conflict situations with different media exposure. These questions are crucial for parties because internal organizational conflicts and their regulation fundamentally affect the ability of political parties to fulfill central democratic functions: in the societal arena, these conflicts undermine the support of the constituency and weaken connections to citizens; in the electoral arena, they affect the parties’ prospects of entering parliament, which in turn has a negative impact on the parties’ ability to effectively engage in opposition work; in the governmental arena, they complicate both effective governance and the consideration of parties as reliable coalition partners. Despite these impacts, there is limited theory-driven, cross-national research on everyday conflict regulation in major parties, exploring formal regulations, the application of conflict resolution mechanisms, and the influence of media coverage on intra-party conflict resolution.
To address this gap, the project will apply a new, multidimensional approach to the analysis of intra-party conflict regulation, simultaneously considering all three dimensions and testing it through a cross-national, mixed-methods research design. To achieve this, intra-party conflict regulations in eight mainstream parties in four European multi-level systems between 1982 and 2023 will be analyzed (Germany, Austria, Spain, United Kingdom). We will combine document analyses to examine formally established rules in party statutes with national and subnational media content analyses of the application of these measures. The examined parties each include the major “left” and “right” party in the countries (which tend to adopt different measures) and faced different institutional changes and issues during the analysis period. The differences within and between countries maximize the diversity of discernible conflict resolution patterns among the eight parties. This, in turn, allows us to gain broader insights into how major parties in advanced democracies handle conflicts.
PIs: Nicole Bolleyer (LMU Munich) & Martin Gross
Independent Local Lists between Challenger and Mainstream Actors in Local Politics
(The project is funded by the German Research Council (DFG), 2024-2026)
Summary:
This project analyzes the influence of Independent Local Lists (ILL) on party competition, coalition formation and political representation in German municipalities. While ILL have become important non-partisan actors in local elections, limited knowledge exists with regard to their ideological positions and their elites’ attitudes towards democratic representation.
The aim of this project is twofold. On the one hand, we aim to shed light on the ideological profiles of ILL and their impact on party competition. We are interested if and to what extent ILL really emphasize local issues more than other political actors, and if ILL pose a challenge for established parties beyond local issues. Additionally, we focus on how ILL affect coalition formations in municipalities. On the other hand, we seek to understand the preferences of ILL elites regarding political representation, which are expected to differ from other party elites due to their non-partisan affiliation. By examining these aspects, the study provides novel insights into the policy profiles and representation preferences by relevant actors on the local level.
To shed light on these aspects we will collect data on the party level as well as on the elite level. The data will be collected in the context of the upcoming German local elections in eight states in spring 2024. Methodologically, we will rely on automated text analysis, utilizing semi-supervised and unsupervised techniques to estimate policy positions of ILL. Further, we will conduct a large-scale online survey to analyze the attitudes of ILL elites.
PIs: Martin Gross, Michael Jankowski (University of Oldenburg/Federal Chancellery) & Christina-Marie Juen (TU Darmstadt)
The Politicisation of Sports (POLSPO)
(The project is funded by the LMU Innovation Fund, 01/2024-12/2024)
Summary:
This project seeks to offer a comparative perspective of the politicisation of sports. It does so outside high-profile, worldwide visible events, and with a particular focus on both the electoral arena (i.e., campaigns and citizens’ perceptions) and the governmental arena (i.e., day-to-day policymaking, portfolio allocation). Key questions that this project addresses and answers include: How and to what extent do political actors deal with issues related to sports? Where is sports attached to within the organisation of supranational, national, and regional portfolios? How is the political discourse shaped by political actors regarding sports in day-to-day policymaking? How do voters perceive sports and does it impact their attitudes towards politics?
PI: Martin Gross
Bevölkerungsseitige Repräsentationsvorstellungen im deutschen Mehrebenensystem – eine Analyse zu den Landtagswahlen 2023 in Bayern und Hessen (BeReDeM) (completed)
(The project is funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, 06/2023-12/2023)
Summary:
Political representation is a central task of democratic systems of government. Democracies must continually work to shape democratic representation in a way that adequately reflects the goals and preferences of citizens. While the debate used to focus on which parties and politicians were best able to represent the interests of citizens, the debate has now changed. Increasingly, questions are being raised about whether certain groups, such as workers, are better able to represent the interests of their class, and what implications this has for democratic governance. This project aims to investigate this assumption by analyzing citizens’ preferences for representation in Bavaria and Hesse in the context of the 2023 state elections. In doing so, it examines whether there are differences in perceptions at the local, state, and federal levels. The central question is: “What are citizens’ perceptions of political representation in the German multi-level system and what are their effects on political behavior?” To answer this question, data will be collected and analyzed as part of a study representative of the German online population.
PIs: Martin Gross and L. Constantin Wurthmann
Representation and inequality in local politics (completed)
(The project was funded by the German Research Council (DFG), 2020-2022)
Summary:
Which social interests are heard in politics – whose interests are overlooked? This important question has been intensively discussed in the social sciences and in society at the national level in recent years, but the municipal level has often been disregarded. The project fills this research gap by answering the question of which societal interests are represented in municipal politics, whether inequalities can be found and, if so, how such inequalities can be explained. To answer these questions, the representation and control activities of local councils in 35 large German cities were investigated in a nationwide comparative research project by using written parliamentary questions. Due to the multi-layered use of parliamentary questions, it was possible to gain important insights into the activity of local councillors in the exercise of their representation and control function. Regarding the control function, it could be shown that the stronger control activity by opposition parties, known from the national level, is also evident at the municipal level. Not only do the opposition parties control the coalition parties in the municipal council, but also those parties that are not the mayor’s party use the tool of written parliamentary questions significantly more often than mayor’s party. Furthermore, it was shown that the multi-level structure of the political system has consequences for the patterns of political control at the municipal level, in that parties with governmental responsibility at the state level control administrative action not only less frequently, but also more conciliatory than pure opposition parties. Regarding the representational function, the project was able to show that the political context of local political action has effects on the representation of interests, in that parties in financially weaker municipalities avoid cost-intensive policy areas. It could also be shown that there is a clear relationship between parties’ issue emphasis in their election campaigns and their issue emphasis in the use of parliamentary questions. Finally, regarding the individual representation performance of the municipal representatives, it could be shown that not only typical socio-demographic factors such as gender or migration status influence the representation of social interests, but also the professional background of the political representatives. Overall, the findings tie in with numerous ongoing academic debates, so that the findings point beyond the specific application case and general insights into patterns and determinants of political representation and control can be gained with the help of municipal politics.
The project webpage can be found here: https://www.en.localpolitics.gsi.uni-muenchen.de/index.html
PIs: Martin Gross and Dominic Nyhuis
Research associates: Sebastian Block and Jan A. Velimsky