This chapter unpacks internal dynamics of political parties and introduces a factional theory of party behavior. The central assertion is that political parties are factional coalitions with different perspectives on political issues. The aim herein is twofold. First, the chapter traces how individual preferences aggregate into group preferences in the form of factional politics. Second, it explores the conditions under which one faction prevails over others. This chapter thus offers a theory of coalition-building within political parties by identifying different types of incentive structures and organizational resources. Factions strive for control over such resources to capture and control the party. Once they form a dominant coalition, they align the party’s trajectory with their own worldview. This chapter builds on the existing studies of behavioral and ideological change to address the issue of aggregation and fill the gap in the literature. It concludes with a brief discussion of these dynamics in the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda.

Attempts by extremist right-wing parties to grow organizational roots in local societies mobilize a diverse array of societal groups against them. The organizational effect of this mobilization has received some scholarly attention but, for the most part, it has defied systematic empirical investigation. This chapter brings together an array of evidence to systematically trace societal mobilization against extremist right-wing parties and to assess the effects of these societal responses on their local organizational development. The first part of the chapter examines how the literature treats societal reactions to extremism to generate various hypotheses about how such reactions shape organizational outcomes. The second section provides an overview of societal responses to the Golden Dawn (GD) in the past decade. It focuses on the diverse array of antifascist actors, their varied organizational resources and their wide range of tactics. The third section seeks to provide a systematic examination of the effects of societal reactions on the organizational evolution of various local branches of the GD.