The selection of party leaders. Origins, methods and consequences.

Emerging research suggests that in many democracies there is evidence of an ongoing shift in authority away from parliamentary parties towards grassroots members in leadership selection and removal. The first objective of this workshop is to document these changes in party organization. We are interested in establishing how widespread these developments are and what are the different forms of membership involvement in leadership politics. We are then interested in better understanding the motivations for change and the factors resulting in specific types of reform. In this sense we propose to build on the literature relating to party organizational change. We are further interested in assessments of whether the objectives of parties undertaking these reforms have been met, particularly the questions of whether these processes have successfully engaged the broader membership and whether leaders chosen through these methods have performed better electorally. A related question is how these changes affect intra party relationships between leaders and both their parliamentary and extra parliamentary organizations. We are also interested in cases of no change where the parliamentary party retains full control of leadership politics. We encourage papers from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. Empirical papers may be case studies of an individual party or party system or may examine one aspect of this topic from a comparative perspective. More conceptually based papers might consider the democratic implications of these changes and how they affect both the distribution of power within parties and the place of parties within democratic states.