Making or Breaking a Politician: the Influence of Popularity on Candidate Selection.

In 1988 Gallagher and Marsh described the selection process of political parties as the secret garden of politics. 30 years later, not much seems to have changed. In Belgium, the selection process still largely happens behind closed doors and politicians generally don’t like to discuss these internal matters. This is remarkable because the selection of candidates plays an important role in the democratic system. Although some parties have a guided form of democracy where members get a consultative vote, the final decision lies with the party elite. The Belgian political system uses a list procedure on which voters can cast a vote for the party as a whole or choose a specific candidate by giving a preference vote. The order of the list is not alphabetical or random but composed by the selectorate of the party. The position politicians have on the list is determinative for their chances: the higher they are on the list, the bigger the chance to get elected. Parties and their executives are rational actors who try to maximize votes and offices by selecting the politicians with the most potential for electoral success. With the growing personalization of politics one can expect that a politician’s popularity is advantageous during the list selection process. By conducting an experiment embedded in face-to-face interviews, with politicians who are part of the selectorate, we try to uncover what characteristics are the most important determinants for a place on the list. The interviews will be done in May 2018 and the interviewed politicians will get five different profiles of potential politicians alongside the question how they would rank these profiles for the composition of a political list. The profiles are constant in terms of gender, age and constituency. Other characteristics such as experience, expertise, loyalty to the party, local base, media exposure and popularity are being manipulated. After the politicians have ranked the profiles, they are asked a follow-up question about why they picked the particular order they did. This paper will not only give an insight into which characteristics play an important role in the selection procedure of political candidates, but also in the differences between the parties.