Factionalism in the Spanish Socialist Party

"The reappearance of conflict within the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the late 1980s and early 1990s has shown once more the propensity of this Iberian party to behave differently from other European socialist and social democratic parties. Although this paper is not comparative, there are a couple of domestic factors that may help to explain this peculiarity. First, there is the unusually strong position of the PSOE in relation to its electoral rivals, which in Sartori's analysis would favour internal party factionalism, although it also means that the PSOE leadership has abundant rewards for party loyalty at its disposal. Second, there would seem to be a clear relationship between factionalism in the PSOE and the existence of autonomous trade unions that have had to be assertive because of their own organizational weakness and the effects of neo-liberal government policies."--Excerpted from Introduction, p. 3.