Research Gap: Political parties fulfill several roles in modern democracies. They structure elections, act cohesively in parliaments or form governments, and influence public policy, but parties are also mass political organizations. They commit to ideologies, organize members, represent and aggregate interests. Typically, party policy is set by an executive, and the party leader in particular. However, leaders are not free to choose whichever course they might prefer. Rather they are constrained by the expectations prevailing in the party organization and in the last consequence by what it is willing to tolerate. The present project offers a unique chance to contribute to the debate on the role of party organizations in constraining leaders in party and public office and how this has changed over time, by analyzing intra-party politics in post-war Austria, spanning a time period of more than seven decades. 

Approach: The project team will employ Quantitative Text Analysis methods to extract data on the economic policy preferences of party leaders and activists, as well as to measure parties’ economic policy stances and governments’ economic policy output. 

Contribution: With this research agenda, the project is contributing to our understanding of what goes on within political parties before the parties take consequential political action. Its theoretical contribution is focused on the processeswithin the organization rather than on party structure or the recruitment of candidates. Empirically, the project will study how party congresses influenced the parties’ electoral manifestos and government output in economic policies. On a more general level, the project will investigate how intra-party politics constrains leaders in party and public office. 

This project is funded by the Jubiläumsfonds of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (grant number: 18610.)