Leaders or parties? Practices of candidate selection in Western Europe

Abstract

Political parties still play a fundamental gatekeeping role in selecting candidates and, consequently, in selecting parliamentary and governmental elites. Nonetheless, the effective room for maneuver of party leaders in candidate selection has not received much attention. This is an interesting area to investigate, also considering recent accounts of intra-party personalization of politics, where party leaders have allegedly become more central. By using a novel dataset on approximately 75 Western European parties and some 250 party leaders between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s, this article analyzes party leaders’ autonomy in selecting candidates for general elections. It tests the effect of party leaders’ determinants (e.g., leadership tenure or leaders' gender) and party determinants (i.e., party membership). Both leader-related and party-related determinants have a significant impact. The results show that political parties can still act as a counterbalancing force vis-à-vis party leaders and call for further investigation into intra-party informal practices.