Democratizing candidate selection: Controlled turnover in Botswana’s Bulela Ditswe primaries

Abstract

Why do political parties implement primary elections? With multi-party elections firmly established, political parties in many young democracies have begun to democratize internally by adopting mass primaries. Previous work argues that parties institute primaries to select for high quality candidates, incentivize campaigning effort, and reduce intra-party conflict. In this paper, I theorize that parties also implement mass primaries to open up the political elite while protecting their most senior members. Consistent with this hypothesis, using original data from Botswana’s ruling party, I find that primaries facilitate a limited and controlled turnover, decreasing the likelihood of re-nomination of long-term incumbents in favor of political newcomers while still protecting senior ministers. Combined with qualitative and historical evidence, these results suggest that electorally successful political parties may implement mass primaries to replace unpopular and entrenched leaders.

Democratizing the Party: The Effects of Primary Election Reforms in Ghana

“…Should we expect similar short-run effects in other settings? Primaries are increasingly common across the developing world (Field and Siavelis 2008), including in Africa (Choi 2018;Warren 2018), where parties in at least fifteen countries now elect their legislative nominees through primaries (Ichino and Nathan 2018). Political parties such as the Botswana Democratic Party have also recently expanded their primary electorates in a similar manner to the NDC (Warren 2018).…”

“…Primaries are increasingly common across the developing world (Field and Siavelis 2008), including in Africa (Choi 2018;Warren 2018), where parties in at least fifteen countries now elect their legislative nominees through primaries (Ichino and Nathan 2018). Political parties such as the Botswana Democratic Party have also recently expanded their primary electorates in a similar manner to the NDC (Warren 2018). While it would not be possible to employ our empirical strategy in countries with single-party dominant or more inchoate party systems, our general theoretical answer is yes, conditional on three scope conditions that affect our proposed mechanism for how expanding the electorate affects the calculations of potential aspirants.…”