Primaries: the unifying force

Hortalà-Vallvé, Rafael; Mueller, Hannes

doi:10.1007/s11127-015-0249-8

Cited by 34 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…For instance, parties might adopt such a promotion rule to eliminate middle-rank activists or internal conflicts within the party to achieve stronger cohesion (Katz and Mair 1995). Hortala-Vallve and Mueller (2015) theorize that parties introduce primaries when party heterogeneity is too great and parties are in danger of splitting into smaller political groups.…”

Section: Theoretical Discussion and Empirical Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rank effects in political promotions

Meriläinen

Tukiainen

2018

Public Choice

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This paper studies the effect of candidates' personal vote ranks on promotions to political power in an open list proportional representation system. Using a regression discontinuity design and data from Finnish local elections, we find that ranking first within a party enhances a politician's chances of getting promoted to the position of a municipal board chair, the most important task in Finnish local politics. Other ranks matter less. We document that the effect of ranking first is larger when there is less within-party competition, but the role of external competition is ambiguous. Our evidence suggests that the mechanism behind the rank effects is primarily unrelated to electoral incentives but rather to party-specific norms or political culture. Ranks seem to be, however, only a complement to other promotion criteria such as politicians' previous political experience or how close to the party lines their policy positions stand.

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Section: Theoretical Discussion and Empirical Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rank effects in political promotions

Meriläinen

Tukiainen

2018

Public Choice

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“…This literature suggests that the key motive for introducing primaries is to replace “smoke-filled rooms” with a more transparent nomination procedure, which is is expected to yield two types of benefits. First, it combats internal party divisions, as shown in the U.S. South (Key 1949) and Latin America (Hortala-Vallve and Mueller 2012; Kemahlioglu, Weitz-Shapiro, and Hirano 2009; Serra 2006). The second benefit is that the party will attract more votes if voters have a preference for more transparent nomination procedures such as voluntary primaries (Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006) or legally introduced primaries (Ware 2002).…”

Section: Theoretical Discussion and Empirical Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions

Folke

Persson

Rickne³

2016

Am Polit Sci Rev

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In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to identify popular politicians and promote them to positions of power. We document this behavior among parties in Sweden's semi-open-list system and in Brazil's open-list system. To identify a causal impact of preference votes, we exploit a regression discontinuity design around the threshold of winning the most preference votes on a party list. In our main case, Sweden, these narrow “primary winners” are at least 50% more likely to become local party leaders than their runners-up. Across individual politicians, the primary effect is present only for politicians who hold the first few positions on the list and when the preference-vote winner and runner-up have similar competence levels. Across party groups, the primary effect is the strongest in unthreatened governing parties.

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“…Primary elections became a democratic outlet for selecting the candidate who was assured to win the subsequent general election. Thus, primary elections may be adopted by heterogeneous parties wishing to avoid fractionalization (Hortala-Vallve and Mueller, 2012), and by dominant parties facing little external competition (Ansolabehere et. al., 2007;Serra, 2006;Kemahlioglu, et.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preferential Voting, Accountability and Promotions into Political Power: Evidence from Sweden

2014

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractPreferential voting has been introduced in a number of proportional election systems over the last 20 years, mainly as a means to increase the accountability of individual politicians. But most of these reforms have been criticized as blatant failures. In this paper, we discover a genuinely new fact, which calls into question this negative evaluation. We show that preferential voting in a general election can operate as a stand-in internal primary election for top party positions. To do this, we rely on a unique data set from four waves of Swedish local elections, which includes every nominated politician in each of 290 municipal assemblies. We use a natural-experiment (regressiondiscontinuity) approach to estimate the causal effect of winning the most preferential votes on becoming the local party leader, and find that narrow "list winners" are over 50 percent more likely to become party leaders than their runner-ups. Comparing across politicians, the effect of list winning is the strongest for competent politicians, who are also more likely to draw preferential votes than mediocre politicians. Comparing across municipalities, the response to narrow list winning is the strongest within unthreatened governing majorities, where voters also use the preferential vote the most frequently.

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Primaries: the unifying force

Cited by 34 publications

References 29 publications

Rank effects in political promotions

Rank effects in political promotions

The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions

Preferential Voting, Accountability and Promotions into Political Power: Evidence from Sweden

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