Intra-Party Conflict and Coalitional Behaviour in Denmark and Norway: The Case of 'Highly Institutionalized' Parties

The purpose of this article is to analyse the impact of intra-party conflicts on the coalitional behaviour of highly institutionalized parties in Denmark and Norway. The focus is on how highly institutionalized parties either prevent or cope with internal conflicts. The account proposed is based on the idea that organizational rigidity, that is the lack of heterogeneous and diffused mechanisms for internal dissent, does not allow the party to handle internal dissent in a variety of flexible ways. When inter-party negotiations induce internal conflicts, members may be forced to leave the party as their primary mechanism for the expression of dissent. A major implication of this view, which is supported by the empirical findings, is that in multi-party systems where minority situations occur, the most attractive strategy (in terms of bargaining power) for highly institutionalized parties is the formation of informal minority governments. When such parties form. formal minority governments, the party elites tend to impose structural constraints on the day-to-day operation of the government and modify their alliance strategy in order to cope with the derived internal conflicts.