WUTHERING THE PARTY HEIGHTS: The Primary Elections within the Romanian Social Democratic Party

The Central and Eastern European political parties are characterized by relatively high levels of centralization in selecting their candidates for the national legislative elections (Kopecky 2001; van Biezen 2003; Millard 2004; Deegan-Krause 2006; Malova and Deegan-Krause 2006; Webb and White 2007). Accordingly, out of approximately 100 political parties with (constant or episodic) presence in parliament only three parties formally specify primary elections – opened to their members – as means to select their candidates. However, the usage of primaries differs considerably across these parties. The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) selected its candidates exclusively on the basis of primaries in all the national elections. The Christian and Democratic Union–Czechoslovak People''s Party (KDU-CSL) included this provision into its statute towards the end of the 90s, but did not implement it. The Romanian Social Democratic Party (PSD) was relatively centralized until 2004 when it introduced primary elections for the selection of candidates. The primaries became optional four years later and were no longer used in 2008. Due to its dynamic, the latter case allows the assessment of consequences generated by primaries for the intra-party development and inter-party competition. By conducting a longitudinal analysis (1992-2011), this paper analyzes how the adoption of primaries altered the intra-party organization (e.g. the number of members), the role of leadership, candidate loyalties, and electoral volatility of the party (longitudinal and cross-party comparison). For an accurate and complete picture of the consequences, I compare the above mentioned party features before (1992-2004), during (2004-2008) and after (2008 onwards) the periods in which candidates were selected on the basis of primary elections. To this end, I use both primary (e.g. party statute and reports, assessment of candidate loyalty, membership rates) and secondary (e.g. electoral results) data. The analysis combines qualitative (i.e. document analysis) and quantitative (cross-tabs and correlations) methods to asses the multiple consequences generated by the adoption of party primaries. The results indicate specific reasons for which the party ceased to use primary elections and provides some explanations for the low incidence of primaries in the new European democracies.