Democratizing Party Leadership Selection

Because the task of choosing a candidate for a country's highest office is so important, political parties seek to devise more inclusive processes of selection, processes that are commensurate with the party's electoral goals. Often this has involved reforming an existing process in ways that open up the mechanisms of leadership choice to a wider `selectorate'. In such a process parties sometimes undergo changes well beyond what may have been anticipated when the reforms were first introduced.

This article examines the process of leadership selection in three political parties that have undertaken major reforms in the process of leadership selection in recent years - the Democratic Party in the United States, the Labour Party in Britain and the Progressive-Conservative Party in Canada. In each instance, it is possible to demonstrate that the method chosen has had significant consequences for the parties themselves and for the party system as a whole, in part because of variations in the inclusiveness of the selectorates created, and also through effects on candidate recruitment.