The book provides a comprehensive view on the internal life of parties and investigates the dynamics of intra-party politics in different party environments to explain in which circumstances the party leader is more or less bound by the wills of party factions.

Analyzing almost 500 intra-party documents from Italy, Germany and France, it presents a theory of intra-party politics that illuminates internal decision-making processes and sheds light on the outcomes of factional conflicts on the allocation of payoffs within the party, on the risk of a party split and on the survival of the party leader. Using text analysis, the results show that consensual dynamics can allow to preserve party unity and that directly elected leaders can exploit their larger autonomy either to reward followers or to prevent splits.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Party Politics, Political Institutions, European Politics and more broadly to Comparative Politics, Political Theory and Text Analysis.