Party Elites' Re-Nomination Practices in Flexible-List Proportional-Representation Political Systems. Cases of the Czech and Slovak Republics

In many political systems, it is political parties rather than voters that determine who the parliamentarians will be. This holds especially for closed- or flexible-list proportional- representation systems where voters have a limited means (or none at all) of influencing which exact individuals will represent them in the parliament (Crisp et al, 2013; Andre et al, 2015, Bergman, 2013). If political parties are highly centralised, we can reasonably speak of a handful of party elites picking all the national legislators (Rahat, 2007; Andre et al, 2014; Siavelis, Morgenstern, 2008). Candidate recruitment practices thus appear to have an considerable impact on the composition of legislative bodies and hence democratic processes (Norris, 1997). It should also be noted that political recruitment in proportional systems is not only limited to the initial selection of new candidates. As they progress in their careers, experienced legislators need to face new rounds of selections anytime a new election draws near and new ballots need to be put together (Shair-Rosenfield, Hinojosa, 2014). Through their control of the renomination of existing legislators, party recruiters not only decide on the composition of legislatures, they also determine which individuals will be allowed to stay on and amass political seniority (Folke, Rickne, 2015). The existing studies examine the impact of the need to be renominated on legislators’ behaviour, focusing primarily on the strategies the latter employ to secure renomination (Beblavy et al, 2012; Andre et al, 2014). What is missing, however, is an comprehensive study of renomination as a political selection, zooming in on the candidate characteristics that party recruiters take into account when deciding who is to be renominated and which place on the ballot they should receive. The aim of this paper is to bridge the existing gap in the literature by studying the process of renomination in FLPR systems from the perspective of party elites who play a decisive role in the process, rather than keeping the more traditional, legislator-centred view. It is argued that party elites, just like their rank-and-file counterparts, seek re-election and thus rely on recruitment criteria that promise to maximise this aim when the ballots are put together. This and related hypotheses are studied using a panel dataset covering all Slovak and Czech national-level legislations in the period between 1996 and 2013.