Giovanna Invernizzi publishes in the American Journal of Political Science

We congratulate Giovanna Invernizzi (Carlo Alberto Postdoctoral Fellow) on her paper “Antagonistic Cooperation: Factional Competition in the Shadow of Elections”, which will appear in the American Journal of Political Science, one of the top and most established journals in political science.

In her paper, Giovanna studies political parties that are internally divided into competing factions.

Using a formal model, she shows that factions’ competition can be positive or destructive to the party depending on features of the competitive environment such as the electoral rule and polarization. The model shows that inter- and intra-party competition are substitutes: Internal competition increases when the electoral stakes are low – for example, in consensus democracies granting power to losing parties – because the incentives to focus on the fight for internal power increase.

This finding improves our understanding of alternative democratic systems by highlighting the oft-neglected effect of different electoral institutions on intra-party competition. The model’s insights can also be extended to any public good provision context in organizations where members engage in “turf wars”.

The article can be found at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12712