Do Party Primaries Decrease Incumbent Party Leaders’ Chances of being Reelected?

The relationship between parties’ selection methods and the recruitment of their party elites (leaders or candidates) is still an underdeveloped research avenue. The main comparative research on this field has addressed some relevant theoretical issues (see. Hazan and Rahat, 2010; Cross and Blais, 2012; Cross and Pilet 2014; Pilet and Cross 2015; Sandri, Seddone and Venturino 2015), but many other research questions are still unresolved. The aim of this paper is to address one of this queries, in particular, whether party primaries decrease the chances of incumbent party leaders of being reelected. Party leader’s reelection is not a concern in the UK where party leaders are not properly reelected until they are challenged. In many other countries, such as in Germany or Spain party leaders have to be reelected in party conferences held at regular intervals, but they are hardly challenged at all. However, when party primaries are introduced, they do seem to have the power to keep party leaders out of their comfort zone and pave the way for potential challengers (see also Ennser-Jedenastik and Schumacher 2015). Relying on the Comparative Party Leaders Selection Methods Dataset compiled by Cross and Pilet (Cross and Pilet 2014) this paper will try to link the use of party primaries with incumbent party leaders’ failed reelections (i.e. losing the election against a challenger). To test this main hypothesis statistical analysis will be used to control by other factors such as party leaders’ length in the post, whether the party is in government or opposition, age and gender of the leader and the challenger, etc.