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.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
