In France, it is not necessary to have the support of a political party when running for an election. However, only very few of these independent candidates succeed to become a Member of Parliament. Political parties are still today the main actors in the political recruitment. The selection procedures vary widely between the French parties. The majority of the parties use a mixed system, which involves the local members and the national organization. In general, the final decision is taken at the national level by a national “investiture committee”, an organization that is not known for its transparency. The selection procedures have thus always been considered as the « black box » of the political parties.
But, today, the political parties are confronted with the challenge of democratization for these selection procedures. The political parties are thus in a tension, between the imperative for more democracy and the aim of maximizing their number of seats at the Assembly- that is their efficiency.
The goal of our paper is to empirically study the democratic evolution of candidate selection within the main political parties in France; to identify the impact of these changes and the difficulties for the political parties to deal with more democracy.
In order to highlight this evolution, I will first base the analysis on the different statutes of the main political parties. With the help of textual analysis software, this will allow us to see when and how the selection procedures have officially become more democratic.
In a second part, I want to confront these official rules to the practice from the MPs and the selectorates. This will be made by the analysis of semi-structured face-to-face interviews and observations conducted with these actors.
