Classifying Party Leaders’ Selection Methods in Parliamentary Democracies

New forms of political participation. Changing demands or changing opportunities to participate in political parties?

“…Internal ballots (closed primaries) are becoming common through European countries for the selection of candidates (Bille, 2001;Pennings and Hazan, 2001;Kenig, 2009a) (Dolez and Laurent, 2007;Lefebvre, 2011); its example was followed by the UMP for the selection of the Paris mayoral candidate for the 2014 municipal elections. The results of such elections, however, can be unexpected: when the Spanish Socialist party or Partido Socialista Obrero Español organised a primary election in 1998 to choose its candidate for Prime Minister at the 2000 elections, the party secretary was defeated in favour of a low profile rival (Hopkin,p.…”

“…Neither tradition conceived of the party leader -if they accepted the principle of such a function/role -as being directly elected by party members. Many did not envisage that activists -let alone memberscould vote to select candidates (Kenig, 2009a) or, if they did, that such ballots could be a secret. This is, however, becoming a prevalent pattern, even if the widening of the selectorate for the election of party leaders is often a staged affair.…”

Choosing party leaders: Anglophone democracies, British parties and the limits of comparative politics

“…Consistent with developments in other parliamentary democracies (LeDuc, 2001;Kenig, 2009a: Kenig, 2009bCross and Blais, 2012a;Cross and Blais, 2012b;Pilet and Cross, 2014;Cross and Pilet, 2015) they have expanded their leadership selectorates beyond parliamentary elites to include party members (Quinn, 2010), delegates and members of affiliated organizations, particularly trade unions (Drucker, 1981;Quinn, 2004;Wickham-Jones, 2014) and even latterly, in the case of the Labour Party, their affiliated and registered supporters (Quinn, 2015;Dorey and Denham, 2016). Building on a recent comparative study of party leadership selection in the five principal Anglophone ('Westminster') parliamentary democracies (Cross and Blais, 2012a), this article first sets out its theoretical framework that purports to explain why the major parties in three of those countries, including Britain, have adopted such reform.…”

The Selection of Party Leaders in Northern Ireland

“…The introduction of a delegate selectorate, therefore, constituted a democratisation of leadership selection in the UUP, with the membership granted greater influence and a more decisive say in the selection of the party leader. However, the involvement of other powerful affiliated bodies in the process meant that the system used by the UUP was 'impure' (Kenig, 2009a), diminishing the influence of those delegates representing the membership. 19 Of these bodies the Orange Order was afforded the greatest number of delegates and was a body with substantial informal influence that leadership candidates actively courted (Jess, 2007).…”

“…As a result, there are no significant legal regulations concerning leadership selection in Northern Ireland with parties free to adopt any method they deem suited to the task. Given such potential idiosyncrasy this study utilises the analytical framework developed by Kenig (2009a) and adopted in other comparative studies of leadership selection (Cross and Blais, 2012;Pilet and Cross, 2014) to make sense of the parties' selection methods. We analyse three key features when classifying Northern Ireland's parties' leadership selection methods: the selectorate; candidacy requirements; and deselection mechanism.…”