National and Local Party Elites: Varying Relations Within the Same Organisation?

Which strategies do national party leaders choose to relate with local party elites during electoral campaigns? Are their strategies uniform or are there substantial variations in this intra-party dimension? This paper analyses whether the incentives provided by the electoral system and by the nature of district competition play the chief role in framing national leadership strategy towards local elites, and whether national elites adopt different intra-party strategies for different constituencies. Thus, our expectation is that the degree of leeway and autonomy local elites enjoy is largely dependent on how national elites rationally equate these two aspects, which have yet been relatively unaddressed. Nevertheless, this approach, focusing on factors linked to the electoral performance and district-level competitiveness, neglects the potentially destabilizing impact on the intraparty dimension of power resources (i.e. patronage) that some local elites may rely on in their constituencies. According to this perspective, intra-party relations are not exclusively the result of a top-down action of national elites. This paper analyses whether and how party strategy for candidate selection vary according to the characteristics of both local party branches and electoral constituencies by focusing on the process of political recruitment, party choice for top list positions, and its degree of renewal. We focus on the relations between party levels in the Portuguese Socialist Party and Social Democrat Party. The national electoral system is party-centred (PR with closed lists) and characterized by a high variation in district magnitude with important partisan effects (Monroe and Rose 2002; Lago and Lobo, 2012). Political recruitment is centralized and informal (Freire 2003; Teixeira 2009). Considering also the recent introduction of primary elections for local office candidates, we use existing and new quantitative and qualitative data for both national and local elections in a study where we uncover the relations between party levels and its determinants.