In Parties under Pressure: The Politics of Factions and Party Adaptation, Dilling highlights the causal efficacy of party organization for Christian Democratic parties’ competitive strategies and electoral payoffs. Dilling’s method is qualitative, causal process tracing of party politicians’ choice of intraparty organizational rules in the founding of parties and their subsequent electoral fortunes.

Dilling’s analytical focal point is political factions, defined as organized intraparty “groups without formal ties to the central party” (4). Division in parties can be regional and functional occupational sections or national factions. If subnational sections dominate party boards selecting and checking party leaders, there is litt Ple room for factionalism. Where such boards are elected in the party-at-large, however, ambitious politicians venture to accumulate intraparty power and office by forming factions to capture high office.

For Dilling, it is party factions, not autonomous party leaders tied down by few intraparty checks, that enable parties to make strategic adaptations that improve their electoral fortunes. But there may be too much or too little of a good thing: Dominance by geographical/functional sections rather than factions freezes national party strategy and prevents electoral adaptation. Int