ABSTRACT
This chapter examines institutional and strategic factors to explain empirically why some dominant parties degenerate into factionalism with severe consequences for their competitiveness while other dominant parties keep factionalism and its worst consequences in check. The impact of institutional incentives is analysed first, notably the prerequisites of majoritarian electoral systems in Britain, which put strong constraints on factionalism by penalising divided parties and raising exit costs for dissidents. Then non-majoritarian electoral systems are examined, notably the old preference list voting system in Italy and single non-transferable vote (SNTV) in multi-member districts in Japan. This shows that by encouraging intra-party competition, nonmajoritarian rules of representation can produce institutionalised factions that act as exit barriers. In the third section the focus shifts to party-specific incentives drawing on evidence from the two classic cases of factionalised dominant parties in competitive democracies: Japan’s Liberal Democrats (LDP) and Italy’s former Christian Democrats (DC). It demonstrates how competitive forces inside factionalised parties can be moderated through majoritarian organisational arrangements that bipolarise intra-party politics, as in the case of the LDP. However, failures to do this create centrifugal forces inside parties that are destabilising and may lead to factional capture and party disintegration, as in the case of the DC. Moving away from institutional explanations, the final section analyses strategic aspects of the relationship between factionalism and party dominance by explaining theoretically how electoral market conditions also shape factional behaviour and impact on the exit costs of dissidents.
