The Government and Its Hard Decisions: How Conflict Is Managed within the Coalition

Although intra-coalition conflicts are considered a serious risk for a government’s survival if they are not efficiently managed, insufficient efforts have been made in the literature to study their impact empirically. Drawing from the comparative literature, we first isolate the most influential factors for the emergence of such conflicts. We then propose a framework for the analysis of conflict management and apply it to the Italian government. Through an extensive newspaper analysis, conflicts have been systematically coded and classified. Two factors emerge as extremely influential for the development of conflicts: the nature of the actors involved and the openness/closure of the decision-making arena to party members who do not belong to the cabinet.