European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics

title : Mobilization and Intra-Party Power Sharing:Theory and Evidence from Norway
abstract : Despite their recognized importance, the inherent opacity of intraparty institutions limits scholarly understanding of how parties share power internally. We advance knowledgein this area by studying how parties allocate list positions to different factions. We develop a theory of intraparty bargaining in which list positions shape the mobilizationefforts of party activists in different factions. Our results allow us to link observablepatterns in list allocations to the importance of consensus in intraparty negotiations.We empirically evaluate these predictions using data from Norwegian municipal elections. We exploit a wave of municipal mergers to identify candidates’ geography-basedfactional affiliations. In line with our theory’s functionalist logic and consensus-basedbargaining, smaller factions are over-compensated in “safe” list positions. While we alsofind a slight over-representation in the contested ranks, the relationship between sizeand resources is much closer to proportionality, as predicted by our theory.Keywords: Geographic Representation, Intra-party Politics, Municipal Mergers.