Everything is Changing…or Not? Institutionalizing Party Leader Selection Rules in Western Europe

In the last decades several Western European parties have opened their leader selection rules. Many scholars have either focused on the causes or on the consequences of such trend, without identifying a generalizable causal mechanism. In this paper we will address a specific issue: the stabilisation and routinization of more open rules to select the party leader. The key research question will be: why do parties institutionalise (more) open party leader selection rules? Concerning the dependent variable, we will consider Kenig, Rahat and Hazan’s framework of analysis to operationalize party leader selection rules in the most relevant Western European parties in the last decades. Many explanations may be proposed to answer the research question of this paper: the decline in absolute and relative party membership levels, the necessity to increase parties’ legitimacy or the base for party leaders’ support, the willingness to take away power from activists in cartel-party-like formations and, finally, electoral defeats and years in opposition. Moreover, we will control for other party-level and systemic-level variables, such as the strength of cleavages, the increase in the levels of electoral volatility, the competitiveness of elections and imitative patterns both at national and at party-family level. The general reasoning is that the institutionalization of more open party leader selection rules is brought about by parties acting in strategic way to reduce both the exogenous (electoral and social one) and the endogenous (organisational) uncertainty. A multivariate quantitative analysis will be used to test the influence of several independent variables on our dependent one. Preliminary evidence shows encouraging results regarding the relationship between, on the one hand, electoral defeats, periods in opposition and decline in membership levels and, on the other hand, changes towards an institutionalisation of more open party leader selection rules.