The purpose of the Paper is to assess the possible relationship between the procedures through which party leaders are selected and their career patterns, an issue that has been partly ignored by both elite studies and the flourishing up-to-date literature on party primaries and candidate and leadership selection (CLS).
Specifically I intend to investigate whether more inclusive procedures of leadership selection are more or less likely to secure the newly elected leader's position within his/her own party, allowing him/her to last many years in office (as party leaders but also eventually as chief executive) and to protect him/her against internal and external challenges. To this end, I will take into account the national party leadership of the main centre-left and centre-right party in four Western European countries (France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom) during approximately the last two decades.
The leadership races under consideration will be ordered on the basis of a combination of the most traditional indicator of CLS inclusiveness (i.e. the largeness of the selectorate) and an indicator which is generally indirectly employed to assess race competitiveness, namely the “effective number of candidates”, which is assumed may help to address the non-formal aspects related to the candidacy dimension. In turn, the leaders’ careers will be evaluated taking into account the reasons why the leadership comes to an end (force majeure, voluntary resignation, post-election resignation, resignation under pressure, formal removal), but also aspects such as the number of party elite endorsements before and after his/her appointment, the duration in office, the ability to be appointed as party chief executive candidate for the general election.
