What is intra-party conflict?

Given its multi-dimensionality, it is curious that intra-party conflict is often simply equated with intra-organizational ideological distance (Gherghina et al., Reference Gherghina, Close and Kopecký2019: 650), despite the fact that not every difference of opinion is actually something to fight about. We build on the work of Lehrer and Lin (Reference Lehrer and Lin2020: 784–786) and argue that it is particularly helpful to think of intra-party conflict as characterized by hostility in intra-party relations. Essentially, we see party (dis-)unity as two-dimensional (Fig. 1): In terms of substance, claims made by actors belonging to the same party organization regarding policy, ideology, personnel, and strategy can be homogenous or heterogeneous (cf. Sjöblom, Reference Sjöblom1968: 183). In terms of valence, such claims can be brought forth with harmony or hostility.

Figure 1. Dimensions of party (dis-)unity: substance and valence.

Taking these two aspects separately is helpful because it clarifies that – while heterogeneity in substance is likely going hand in hand with hostility in valence – the two dimensions are conceptually separable. Theoretically, parties can experience vigorous and passionate infighting whenever there are at least two alternatives with respect to policy, personnel, or strategy. Reversely, different party actors can propose a multitude of positions on an issue without this being understood and framed as an internal conflict at all. Indeed, this separation helps us make sense of divergent findings in the existing literature and thereby situate our investigation into the broader scholarly context:

A party organization that is united in terms of being both homogeneous and harmonious displays cohesion in Sjöblom’s sense: It is a party in which there is ‘a rallying of the members round the output decided by the party’ (Sjöblom, Reference Sjöblom1968: 183 emphases added; cf. also 201). Party leaders have used their resources and power in selecting among the alternative positions existing inside the organization in such a way that it invigorates the members and (re-)establishes harmony in internal relations (Sjöblom, Reference Sjöblom1968: 203). But there can be (1) strategic reasons for why reducing heterogeneity is undesirable or (2) organizational reasons for why reducing hostility is impossible.

1. (1) Being disunited in the sense of sending ambiguous, tailored, or even inconsistent messages can be electorally advantageous (e.g., Downs, Reference Downs1957; Page, Reference Page1976; Tomz and Van Houweling, Reference Tomz and Van Houweling2008; Rovny, Reference Rovny2012; Somer-Topcu, Reference Somer-Topcu2015; Lo et al., Reference Lo, Proksch and Slapin2016; Bräuninger and Giger, Reference Bräuninger and Giger2018), particularly if parties are not too obvious in catering simultaneously to different audiences (Sjöblom, Reference Sjöblom1968: 86; cf. Snyder and Ting, Reference Snyder and Ting2002; Martin, Reference Martin2019; Tromborg, Reference Tromborg2021) or engaging in outright flip-flopping (Nasr, Reference Nasr2023; Nyhuis and Stoetzer, Reference Nyhuis and Stoetzer2021). The phenomenon of party leaders deliberately staging or highlighting intra-party heterogeneity to simultaneously appeal to different electoral constituencies is known as the broad-appeal strategy (Somer-Topcu, Reference Somer-Topcu2015).

2. (2) Being disunited in the sense of openly feuding with one another, in turn, undermines the effectivity of a broad appeal profoundly (Lehrer and Lin, Reference Lehrer and Lin2020, Reference Lehrer and Lin2022; Lin and Lehrer, Reference Lin and Lehrer2021). What is more, outright hostility in intra-party relations is of course not a deliberate strategy but the expression of power struggles over the appropriate course of the party. Such intra-party conflict signals to voters that the party lacks competence (Greene and Haber, Reference Greene and Haber2015) and is unable to carry out the policy proposals it promised. That is, it becomes questionable how responsive and accountable the party can be to its principal (cf. Bowler et al., Reference Bowler, Farrell, Katz, Bowler, Farrell and Katz1999: 3; Müller, Reference Müller2000).

We analyze here when political parties are perceived to be internally conflicted by the electorate. It is in particular hostility in intra-party relations that has been shown to have highly deleterious electoral consequences for parties in parliamentary democracies, using both, observational (Greene and Haber, Reference Greene and Haber2015; Barrett, Reference Barrett2018; Lehrer and Lin, Reference Lehrer and Lin2020, Reference Lehrer and Lin2022; Lin and Lehrer, Reference Lin and Lehrer2021) as well as experimental data (Lehrer et al., Reference Lehrer, Stöckle and Juhl2022; see also Duell et al., Reference Duell, Lea Kaftan, Slapin and Wratil2023).Footnote ¹ But it is not only at election time that intra-party conflict matters. We know that politicians nowadays constantly refer to polls, care about their parties’ image in the electorate, and respond even when elections are not around the corner. Hager and Hilbig (Reference Hager and Hilbig2020), for example, have shown how politicians fine-tune their speeches to public opinion also during the legislative term. Moreover, party leaders need to be alert to signs of conflict in their organization and become active, in particular when the conflict becomes so visible that regular voters start to take note. This is because it is not clear that all damage done can be repaired within the confines of an election campaign and because conflict can spiral out of control and threaten the survival of the organization as such (Sjöblom, Reference Sjöblom1968: 205; cf. Boucek, Reference Boucek2009). It thus becomes crucial to understand when voters perceive parties to be internally conflicted. Previous research on this question has focused on short-term campaign dynamics (Plescia et al., Reference Plescia, Kritzinger and Eberl2021) and differences by party types (Zur, Reference Zur2021).

Intra-party conflict perceptions through the democratic life cycle

We argue that there are predictable regularities in voters’ perceptions of intra-party conflict that stem from the periodic conduct of elections. Factors that vary through the legislative term, as well as across legislative terms, incentivize higher levels of intra-party conflict and increase its visibility to the electorate. We refer to this as a ‘democratic life cycle perspective’, appropriating a concept developed in the study of government coalitions (cf. Müller et al., Reference Müller, Bergman, Strøm, Strøm, Müller and Bergman2008). By ‘democratic life cycle’ we mean the recursive progression of phases of competition, election, and government, where each phase is connected but also each sequence impacts the next (cf. Müller et al., Reference Müller, Bergman, Strøm, Strøm, Müller and Bergman2008: 8–12): Citizens’ perceptions and evaluations crystallize as a function of the competition within and between parties. They are sharpened as elections approach and they manifest themselves in electoral results as well as the governments they enable. At the same time, the latter have a recursive effect on citizens’ evaluations as the democratic life cycle begins anew.

Specifically, our theory starts from the presumption that citizens receive the bulk of information on which they base their perceptions of political parties as organizations from reporting in the media.Footnote ² Different constellations throughout the democratic life cycle (pertaining to the internal heterogeneity of a party, its participation in government, the proximity of an election, and past electoral performance) systematically influence the level of hostility displayed between politicians within the same party as well as the extent of media coverage on the party (with a conflict frame). Thereby, the four factors reverberate in the perceptions that citizens develop of the parties (see Fig. 2).

Figure 2. The democratic life cycle and intra-party conflict perceptions.

It is important to note in this respect that the distinction between hostile intra-party relations and media reporting only carries so far: In terms of the classic distinction made by Sjöblom (Reference Sjöblom1968), politicians belonging to the same party organization can feud with one another in the internal arena (e.g., at a party convention), in the parliamentary arena (e.g., in a legislative debate or in the cabinet), and in the electoral arena (e.g., in the communication with voters at rallies). More often than not, however, conflict only becomes clear across these different arenas (e.g., when a faction of the party criticizes the parliamentary party group or when a subnational leader criticizes the national party leadership on social media). In an important sense, then, intra-party conflict only becomes manifest because the media brings together behavior that is scattered through diverse forums (cf. Somer-Topcu, Reference Somer-Topcu2015: 848). That is, the media provides a venue for, and frames interactions as, conflict in the first place (cf. Stanyer, Reference Stanyer2003).

First, we expect that higher intra-party heterogeneity is positively related to higher levels of perceived intra-party conflict. While we have presented heterogeneity in substance and hostility in valence as conceptually distinct dimensions of actual party (dis-)unity above, in practice there is likely a positive relationship between the two. Divergent policy positions are expressed by politicians within and across the internal, the parliamentary, and the electoral arenas (Kam, Reference Kam2009; Greene and Haber, Reference Greene and Haber2015, Reference Greene and Haber2016; Proksch and Slapin, Reference Proksch and Slapin2015; Ceron, Reference Ceron2019). The resulting variance of policy positions is sometimes deliberate, as part of a broad-appeal strategy, but more often reflects the fact that politicians, activists, and members hold genuinely different visions of the party’s mission to transform society and the state based on their own experiences, norms, and characteristics. Heterogeneity breeds hostility when the issue is so salient that the different policies considered are seen as conflicting, attempts of the leadership to solicit loyalty or enforce discipline are weak, and politicians, then, because they believe in a specific solution, or for reasons of personal advantage, frame and publicize their disagreement as such. In other cases, organizational subunits inside the party contest their own elections and use them as occasions to gain traction for their own visions or signal responsiveness to specific electorates (Müller, Reference Müller2013).

Journalists readily read conflict into heterogeneity. In general, they find ‘intraparty struggles very newsworthy […] [and] often play a proactive role in reconstructing internal party strife for audience consumption […] thus reestablishing the significance of their contribution’ (Stanyer, Reference Stanyer2003: 85). In this, the media is aided by a party’s competitors who will always be quick to dramatize any internal programmatic variance and further the party’s image as internally conflicted for their own electoral benefit (Robertson, Reference Robertson1976: 52). Overall, we thus expect that:

Despite high levels of party unity in legislative voting, government parties are often particularly likely to be associated with intra-party conflict (cf. Sieberer, Reference Sieberer2006). On the one hand, governing parties actually experience more public feuding. This is because they have to deal with unanticipated events and constraints out of their control. A lower budget than expected, for instance, frustrates the aspirations of those in office. Governing parties thereby regularly antagonize activists and factions who demand the party makes good on its promises.

The problem is particularly severe for parties which govern in coalitions. Reflecting the need for compromise, coalition partners meet each other somewhere in the middle (Warwick, Reference Warwick2001) with no party being able to realize its true policy preference, irrespective of external constraints to governance. Coalition governments thus hardly implement the pure vision that supporters and particularly activists were rooting for. There is thus often a conflict between the government (the parliamentary arena in Sjöblom’s scheme) and parts of the party organization (who articulate their dissatisfaction mostly in the internal arena).

Even if governing per se would not lead to more actual intra-party conflict, the conflict that exists in governing parties is subject to more media attention and interpretation: Information on government parties is more easily accessible (Baumgartner and Chaqués Bonafont, Reference Baumgartner and Bonafont2015: 271). Feuding inside governing parties makes for a better story – the stability of government is at stake after all (Baum and Groeling, Reference Baum and Groeling2009; Kane, Reference Kane2020). Finally, governing parties are held to a different standard by voters (cf. Fortunato, Reference Fortunato2021) and journalists; governing parties are expected to be particularly competent and professional (in contrast to opposition parties). Signs of internal conflict are paid special attention because they present a mismatch with these expectations.

Party leaders have an interest in minimizing hostility in intra-party relations. This desire is particularly pronounced around election day because leaders know that internal feuding is electorally harmful (Sjöblom, Reference Sjöblom1968; Ceron, Reference Ceron2019) and that a united appearance is a central advantage in the negotiations to join government coalitions (Bäck, Reference Bäck2008). Around election day party leaders thus implore members to engage in team-like behavior; this is the moment in which it really matters for everyone to pull on the same string, particularly in the communication to voters (the electoral arena). What is more, calls for unity are especially likely to fall on fruitful soil at this time. Even notorious rebels and trouble-makers – those politicians that are well known for frequently challenging the leadership out of conviction or to advance their career – have incentives to tone-down their demands in order not to weaken their party electorally; after all, they seek to influence the course of their party, not to sabotage it. To buttress their effort of communicating a harmonious image in the electoral arena, leaders aim to keep conflictual issues out of the parliamentary and internal arenas. The latter is particularly important for securing support from the party base in the electoral arena, i.e., mobilizing members and supporters to hang posters, canvass, and engage with citizens in market places.

While actual intra-organizational hostility thus tends to be lower during election times, another mechanism that will make a difference for voters’ perceptions is, again, media reporting. During election campaigns and in the direct aftermath of elections, there is a genuine story about inter-party competition: Journalists and voters gravitate toward the ‘horserace’ (Iyengar et al., Reference Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn2004) and the question of who will take over power, given that most electoral systems do not produce single-party governments on a regular basis. During a legislative term, in contrast, stories of inter-party competition are less ready to come by. The focus of the media is more on government-opposition divides and, crucially, intra-party dynamics.

Perceived intra-party conflict is associated with poor electoral performance in the short run (Greene and Haber, Reference Greene and Haber2015; Barrett, Reference Barrett2018; Lehrer and Lin, Reference Lehrer and Lin2020, Reference Lehrer and Lin2022; Lin and Lehrer, Reference Lin and Lehrer2021; Lehrer et al., Reference Lehrer, Stöckle and Juhl2022) but the relationship is not unidirectional in the medium to long-run. That is, poor electoral performance also prompts intra-party conflict (Greene and Haber, Reference Greene and Haber2016; Schumacher and Elmelund-Præstekær, Reference Schumacher and Elmelund-Præstekær2018). An electoral loss is a welcome opportunity for internal rivals to seek party change and prompt challenges to the current leadership (Harmel et al., Reference Harmel, Heo, Tan and Janda1995; Budge et al., Reference Budge, Ezrow and McDonald2010). Whatever discontents exist and may have been swept under the rug now surface, first and foremost in the internal arena. Additionally, even if there had been no genuine ideological disagreements before, electoral losses will prompt actors to question the course of the party for electoral reasons. Such processes are rarely quiet affairs; because so much is at stake, conflict regularly accompanies it. For these dynamics to unleash, trends will matter more than singular events. While a party might stay united after a single lost election, losses that accumulate will trigger demand for more radical change (Marx and Schumacher, Reference Marx and Schumacher2013) and the attendant public disagreements.

Poor electoral performance is particularly likely to find reflection in the voter’s mind because the failure of the respective leader(s) or main candidate(s) and the ensuing attacks of their internal opponents make for a particularly good story. Because the notion that electoral success requires a united appearance is widespread, intra-party conflict makes for a handy lens through which party performance can be interpreted. Especially when electoral losses are accumulating, journalists are likely to seek out intra-party conflict. The narrative is simply more interesting than a complex story that would relay, say, poor electoral performance to the disintegration of cleavages due to social change. The media is thus likely to report and the voters likely to take notice.

Research design

We test these hypotheses on the case of Germany, which is particularly apt for three reasons. First, the pioneering studies on the electoral effects of perceived intra-party conflict have focused on Germany (Greene and Haber, Reference Greene and Haber2015; Lehrer et al., Reference Lehrer, Stöckle and Juhl2022). The detrimental effect of intra-party conflict is thus well-documented and also widely appreciated by journalists and politicians themselves.

Second, Germany is a typical parliamentary system of government in which its political parties are complex membership-based organizations rather than loose networks of candidates and supporters (cf. Katz, Reference Katz and Caramani2017). In that sense, we expect our findings to apply directly to other parliamentary systems. Indeed, the finding that intra-party conflict undermines the effectivity of the broad-appeal strategy, established for Germany originally as well (Lehrer and Lin, Reference Lehrer and Lin2020), travels easily to other parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies (Lin and Lehrer, Reference Lin and Lehrer2021; Lehrer and Lin, Reference Lehrer and Lin2022; cf. Jung and Somer-Topcu, Reference Jung and Somer-Topcu2022).

Third, the Politbarometer, a monthly opinion poll contains, among numerous other questions (Wüst, Reference Wüst2003), an explicit measure of voters’ perceptions of intra-party conflict for each of the major parties (CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP, Greens, PDS/The Left, AfD) encompassing a period of 16 years.Footnote ³ These surveys thus provide us with the unique opportunity to test the hypotheses related to the democratic life cycle. Indeed, and curiously given the high importance that analysts, observers, and even politicians accord to it, explicit measurements of intra-party conflict perceptions are rare, cross-nationally but also for individual countries. The few explicit measures for intra-party conflict that exist (Greene and Haber, Reference Greene and Haber2015; Barrett, Reference Barrett2018; Plescia et al., Reference Plescia, Kritzinger and Eberl2021) are limited to a single time point or a couple of months at most. We bring this data on the perceptions of citizens together with objective data on intra-party heterogeneity and other situational factors related to the democratic life cycle.

Dependent variable

The Politbarometer question we use to operationalize the dependent variable reads: ‘What do you think: Is the [party] rather feuding or rather united with respect to important political issues?’Footnote ⁴ While of course not all ambiguity can be ruled out, this question should pertain in particular to perceptions of intra-party conflict rather than perceptions of heterogeneity. This is because the German zerstritten semantically strongly implies hostility in everyday language and therefore triggers the respective considerations in the heads of respondents (Zaller, Reference Zaller1992). Additionally, a cursory look at media reporting about parties shows that zerstritten is used exactly in the sense of vigorous disagreement rather than harmonious coexistence of different opinions.Footnote ⁵ A similar indicator for intra-party conflict is used by Greene and Haber (Reference Greene and Haber2015) as well as Plescia et al. (Reference Plescia, Kritzinger and Eberl2021).

We translate the two answer options into a binary measure that takes a value of 1 if the respondent regards the respective party as being internally conflicted. The item has been included quite regularly, throughout different legislative terms as well as different political constellations, as Fig. 3 shows. It covers the coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the smaller Green Party, coalitions between both big parties – the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, and the intermittent coalition between the Christian Democrats and the smaller Liberal Party.Footnote ⁶ In total, our analyses are based on the intra-party conflict perceptions of about 60,000 respondents.Footnote ⁷ Appendix A.2 details the summary statistics of the dependent and independent variables.

Figure 3. Number of respondents by survey and governing parties at the time.

Notes: For each survey the number of respondents who are included in the final regression model is shown.

Analyzing the sources of intra-party conflict perceptions

We find that voters’ perceptions of intra-party conflict are indeed highly dynamic and systematically respond to the democratic life cycle. First and foremost, there is a consistent relationship between intra-party heterogeneity and perceived intra-party hostility. In line with HYPOTHESIS 1, the results of our logistic regression models (Table 1) show that respondents are more likely to perceive a party as internally conflicted, when the party’s organizational entities exhibit greater variance in terms of advanced policy positions as well as the way policies are described, justified, and communicated. According to our theory, divergent opinions inside a party go hand in hand with higher levels of hostility: While sometimes heterogeneity reflects a coordinated broad-appeal strategy, it is often an expression of party actors struggling for the right course of party and country. The media picks up these disputes because of the attractivity of the conflict frame (Stanyer, Reference Stanyer2003) and the public receives the signals.

Table 1. Determinants of voters’ intra-party conflict perceptions

Notes: Coefficients from logistic regression models with standard errors clustered by respondent in parentheses. The dependent variable reflects the internal conflict perception that individual respondents have of the political party they are asked to evaluate. Dummy variables for surveys and West/East Germany included but not shown. Statistical significance: *P < 0.01, **P < 0.001.

If a party governs on the national level, voters are more likely to perceive internal conflict compared to when it is in the opposition, all else equal. Our theory argues that government parties have more inner-party tensions as activists are unhappy with the compromises the coalition or the situation dictate. Additionally, the media scrutinizes the state of government parties more in general. This supports HYPOTHESIS 2. Note that the effect is also quite substantial: According to our model, the likelihood of being perceived as internally conflicted is 0.44 for opposition parties and 0.64 for governing parties. Taken together with the previous finding that perceived intra-party conflict makes voters less likely to vote for a party, this effect might thus contribute to the general pattern of government parties losing in elections. It is therefore not simply specific compromises on public policies themselves that are likely to alienate voters. Rather, the mere opportunity to compromise appears to be costly (Fortunato, Reference Fortunato2021).Footnote ¹⁴ It is important to note here that any party needs to compromise on policy purity once it comes into office but that the effect is likely stronger for parties that govern in coalitions compared to parties that govern individually.

In line with HYPOTHESIS 3, respondents tend to perceive more conflict, the further away the survey was conducted from election day, all else equal. Party leaders’ attempts to minimize conflict (Sjöblom, Reference Sjöblom1968) and members’ willingness to put disputes on hold thus seem to be somewhat successful.Footnote ¹⁵ Before elections, a feuding appearance hurts the party’s electoral chances. Directly after elections, intra-party conflict is harmful because it hinders the winning parties’ bargaining power in coalition talks (Bäck, Reference Bäck2008). However, the effect is not overly large, signaling that the leadership is not entirely successful and that not every rift can be repaired or concealed within the few weeks of the campaign.Footnote ¹⁶

Finally, our analysis provides evidence of the reciprocal relationship between elections, intra-party conflict, and citizens’ perceptions thereof. It is not simply the case that intra-party conflict hurts a party electorally in the short run. In the medium to long run, lost elections impact the perceptions of voters, especially if they are recurring.Footnote ¹⁷ We find that, as the share of lost elections increases, the likelihood of perceiving internal conflict increases, all else equal. According to our theory, an accumulation of electoral losses signals to competitors of the leadership a chance to overturn it. Additionally, intra-party disputes are a plausible frame for the media to make sense of a party’s electoral losses.Footnote ¹⁸

Supporting explanatory approaches based on party types (Zur, Reference Zur2021), our analysis also shows that there are considerable differences between parties. CDU and FDP are generally perceived to experience less internal conflict than the SPD. At the same time the Greens are perceived to experience more internal conflict. It seems like their often turbulent past still manifests itself in public perception. Overall, there is a tendency for left parties to be perceived as more internally conflicted (the coefficient for the FDP and The Left wavers somewhat between models). The clear exception to the pattern is the right-wing AfD, which is perceived to experience considerably more internal conflict than any other party. The AfD was a very new party in consolidation when the voters rated its conflict in our sample. At the time, there was marked internal dispute about personnel and policy (Bieber et al., Reference Bieber, Roßteutscher and Scherer2018: 441).

Our theory presumes that the four factors associated with the democratic life cycle imprint themselves in voters’ perceptions by heightening intra-party hostility and by increasing its salience in media reporting. Unfortunately, there are no measures available that specifically assess the objective level of hostility in intra-party relations (analogous to our objective measure of heterogeneity within a party) or systematically quantify media reporting on intra-party conflict for the long time period we are studying. This means that we cannot directly test the posited theoretical mechanisms (see Fig. 2). However, we provide indirect support by repeating the analysis, distinguishing those respondents that are politically interested from those that are not with a dummy variable and interacting it with each of the main independent variables. If the four factors operate in the way our theory posits, it is the politically interested that should be particularly responsive: These are the citizens likely to consume reporting about politics, be attentive to intra-party relations, and therefore take note of more (reported) hostile interactions, as induced at different stages of the democratic life cycle. This is exactly what we find (reported in Appendix A.7): The interaction effects between political interest and the four factors are positive and three out of four are statistically significant.

The democratic life cycle and partisanship

In line with ideas about the centrality of partisanship in political thinking (Campbell et al., Reference Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes1960) and motivated reasoning (e.g., Zaller, Reference Zaller1992; Lodge and Taber, Reference Lodge and Taber2013), voters who identify with a political party tend to perceive that party as more united (Plescia et al., Reference Plescia, Kritzinger and Eberl2021) and consider only the relative intra-party conflict they perceive for the opponent parties in their voting decisions (see Appendix, Figure A.1.1). This is because team-like behavior and atavistic thinking is central to partisanship (Achen and Bartels, Reference Achen and Bartels2016). Partisans care about the reputation of their ‘team’ in a manner that is at least somewhat insensitive to objective conditions. Accordingly, they tend to actively seek information that portrays opposing parties as divided (Kane, Reference Kane2020). Conversely, there is a tendency among partisans to dismiss arguments suggesting internal conflicts within their own party. Instead, any visible and hostile disagreements are often rationalized as ‘healthy’, ‘necessary’, and ‘democratic’ intra-party discussions.

Do party-colored glasses obscure voters’ perceptions of intra-party conflict as related to the democratic life cycle or do the relationships we identified materialize among partisans as well? To address this question, we include a binary variable in our regression model indicating whether the respondent ‘leans’ toward the party whose level of internal conflict is being evaluated as well as interactions with the central independent variables. The ‘leaning’-question is the standard measure of partisanship in the European context (cf. Barnes et al., Reference Barnes, Jennings, Inglehart and Farah1988; Dassonneville and Grieb, Reference Dassonneville and Grieb2018). We summarize the results of the analysis with the help of graphs that display how likely it is that a respondent perceives a certain party as being internally conflicted (Fig. 4; see also Appendix A.8 and A.9).

Figure 4. Predicted probabilities of perceiving intra-party conflict.

Notes: Shaded area represents the 95% confidence interval. Rugs show the empirical variance of the respective independent variable.

We find that the party toward which the respondent leans is generally perceived to be less internally conflicted. Citizens’ partisanship thus greatly influences their interpretation of the parties’ internal status. In a cheerleading manner, they judge out-parties to be more internally conflicted, while suppressing signs that their party is internally conflicted or rationalizing objective conflict in the name of intra-party democracy.

That being said, the analysis also shows that the variables associated with the democratic life cycle have largely the same effects for those that lean toward the evaluated party as for those that do not. Partisans update their perceptions of intra-party conflict with the dynamics of the political life cycle in much the same way as those who identify with other parties or with no party. As Fig. 4 shows, even for the perception of partisans, it makes a great difference whether a party is heterogeneous, governs, is soon contesting an election, or suffers from a losing streak. On the individual level, partisans’ perceptual screen lowers the general level of conflict that is perceived but does little to dim the periodic substantial increases related to the democratic life cycle.Footnote ¹⁹ On the electoral level, the continuous decrease of partisanship (Dassonneville and Grieb, Reference Dassonneville and Grieb2018: 50), further hinders the bulwark party leaders can depend on to dim the deleteriousness of intra-party conflict.