An Overlooked Type of Polarization: Factional Feuds Within Parties

American politics is notorious for the loathing Republicans and Democrats feel for each other. But an often-overlooked fact is that both parties contain sub-groups who intensely dislike each other too. Among Republicans, there is hostility between the MAGA Movement and the Never Trumpers, while among Democrats, there is division between progressives who lean towards the likes of Bernie Sanders and moderates who prefer politicians like Joe Biden. Divisions within parties have led to resignations, public mudslinging, social media warfare, and even fisticuffs on the Senate floor. But hostility between parties is more acrimonious than hostility within parties, right? My research, conducted with Dr Lee de-Wit, says: not always!

Within both parties, we identified two ways of dividing supporters into rival camps, or “factions.” For Republicans, one division was between Republicans who prefer Trump versus Liz Cheney, and the other was between Republicans who think the 2020 election was stolen and those who don’t. For Democrats, one division was between Democrats who prefer Biden versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the other was between Democrats who support striking bipartisan compromises with Republicans to pass laws and those opposed.

For each division, people indicated which faction they felt closer to and rated how much they liked members of all the factions. This meant we could calculate how much supporters of each faction liked their own faction more than the rival faction within their party and whether they ever preferred a faction from the opposing party over their rivals. For comparison, we also got the same ratings for the larger political parties that each person supported or opposed.

Overall, we found that people clearly preferred their own factions over the rival factions within their party; however, this preference was typically not as strong as the preference people had for their party over the other one. There was one exception, however: pro-Trump Republicans preferred themselves over pro-Cheney Republicans by a slightly greater margin than Republicans as a whole preferred themselves over Democrats.

We found similar results in Great Britain, using data from MHP Group’s “Polarisation Tracker.” There, we used the division with the Labour Party between supporters of the party’s centrist leader Keir Starmer, and supporters of the more left-leaning former leader Jeremy Corbyn. In the Conservative Party, we used two divisions: one between those who wanted to cut taxes and spending and those who wanted not to, and the other between those who did not want former leader Boris Johnson to resign as Prime Minister and those who did. Notably, we conducted this part of the study about a week after Johnson had resigned.

Again, people preferred their own faction over the rival faction within their party by a large margin, but not as large as the margin by which they tended to like their own party’s supporters over their rival party’s supporters. But this time there were three exceptions. Both Labour factions preferred themselves over their rivals by a greater margin than the Conservative party supporters preferred themselves over Labour party supporters, and the pro-Boris Johnson Conservative faction preferred themselves over the anti-Boris Johnson faction more than either party’s supporters liked themselves more than the opposing party’s supporters.

Results from both studies echo the common finding that people prefer their own political party over another, but they also reveal that equally strong forces are sometimes in play within parties.

But there was one even more surprising finding. In many cases, people preferred a rival party’s faction to their same-party rivals. For example, people in all four Republican factions said they liked a Democrat faction (the pro-bipartisan compromise group) more than their rival factions within the GOP! In Great Britain, both Labour factions liked the anti-Boris Johnson Conservative faction more than their opponents within Labour.

So, hostility between factions within the same party is substantial—so substantial that it sometimes equals or exceeds the degree of hostility between parties and frequently leads people to dislike members of rival factions within their own party more than they dislike supporters of rival parties.

These results might help explain why the mutual dislike between Republicans and Democrats has risen to record levels. Social scientists often attribute this to rises in how strongly people identify as supporters of a political party. However, if people often prefer members of rival parties over other members of their own party due to factional divisions, this must mean that simply aligning with a broad political party doesn’t tell the whole story.

Instead, we suspect that other factors may explain the widening gulf between parties, like disagreement over values and policy matters, which are also at play within parties.

For Further Reading

Young, D. J., & de-Wit, L. K. (in press). Affective polarization within parties. Political Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12973

Orr, L.V., Fowler, A., & Huber, G. A. (2023). Is affective polarization driven by identity, loyalty, or substance? American Journal of Political Science, 67, 948-962. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12796

Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22(1), 129–146. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034

David Young is a Research Associate in the Political Psychology lab at the University of Cambridge. David is interested in polarization, the origins and consequences of perceptions of political bias, and modelling approaches to political cognition.