Does It Pay Off? The Effects of Party Leadership Elections on Parties’ Trustworthiness and Appeal to Voters

Abstract

<jats:p> In the last few decades, political parties in several Western countries have opened up the process of leadership selection to all party members. So far, research has mainly focused on the drivers of this development, taking into account both internal factors (reducing power of middle-level party elites) and external factors (increasing the party’s attractiveness). Only few studies have tested the effects of these external arguments. In this study, we investigate whether parties that select their leader inclusively (1) exhibit higher levels of trustworthiness, and are more appealing to (2) voters and (3) potential members. Based on the procedural fairness argument, we expect a positive effect of inclusive procedures. We conduct a vignette experiment with fictional parties and find that inclusive selection procedures do not strengthen citizens’ perceptions of trustworthiness. Moreover, citizens are not more willing to vote or join parties with inclusive selection procedures. </jats:p>

How many captains for a ship on electoral drift? Limiting the number of leadership candidates in the Flemish Christian-democratic party (CD&V)

“…Over the last decades, political parties in established democracies have increasingly introduced internal democracy, allowing the involvement of rank and file members in important policy and organizational decisions (Pilet and Cross, 2014;Ignazi, 2020). The goals of these reforms were aimed at repairing the linkage between state and society (Wolkenstein, 2016;Borz and Janda, 2020), increasing the party's attractiveness among citizens (Close et al, 2017;Wauters and Kern, 2020) and improving the performance and the image of the party (Scarrow, 1999;Pedersen and Schumacher, 2015). The most prominent change is arguably the democratization of party leadership selection (LeDuc, 2001;Ignazi, 2020).…”

“…This adds to the research on party leadership elections in three ways. First the focus is on the informal side of party leadership elections while earlier research has mostly looked at formal rules and their direct effects (Kenig et al, 2015;Pedersen and Schumacher, 2015;Wauters and Kern, 2020). Next we concentrate on the role of elites in these elections and not on the behavior of party members (Seddone et al, 2020).…”

Are Citizens More Politically Engaged when Candidate Selection is Democratic? Analysis of Seven Parliamentary Election Cycles in Israel (1996–2015)

“…Three studies stand out in this respect. First, Wauters and Kern (2021) conduct an experimental study into the effects of inclusive leadership contests on citizens’ perceptions of the party’s trustworthiness, and their inclination to vote or to join the party as a member. The authors find no effect of selecting the party leader in an inclusive manner on the attractiveness of parties for citizens.…”

“…This time lag might also explain why Pedersen and Schumacher (2015) and Cozza and Somer-Topcu (2021) only find a short-term boost in the parties’ polling results and no long-term electoral effect: by the time the election takes place, voters’ initial enthusiasm about the democratic nature of leadership selections has already waned off. Furthermore, in times of thriving centralized personalization (Balmas et al 2014), where election campaigns are increasingly focused on the electoral or party leader, it may also be the case that the short-term polling boost is caused by the new face of the party leader instead of the inclusive selection procedure itself (Wauters and Kern 2021).…”

“…Earlier scholarly work provides mixed evidence when it comes to citizens’ responses to such democratization efforts. Several studies show that intra-party democratization does not necessarily lead to increased political participation (Carty and Blake 1999; Webb 2002), fails to attract large numbers of activists and leads to short opportunistic membership increases (Rahat and Hazan 2007), potentially causes public displays of internal conflicts (Greene and Haber, 2015), or has no impact on citizens’ perceptions of the party or willingness to vote for or become member of the party (Wauters and Kern 2021). Other studies only point to short-term effects on public excitement and higher scores in opinion polls, and a lack of long-term electoral effects (Cozza and Somer-Topcu 2021; Pedersen and Schumacher 2015).…”