The diffusion of primaries for selecting "party leaders"

In recent years “primary elections” have been increasingly used for selecting candidates to legislative and executive offices as well as top party leaders. This innovation has triggered important organizational and behavioural changes within parties, but both the reasons for their implementation and their consequences are disputed. Some scholars argue party primaries can be a good procedure to open political environments and allow citizens to participate more actively in the democratic process. Others maintain a less enthusiastic view: either arguing primaries are triggering the emergence of a new “plebiscitarian” style of party leadership, or that there is a trade-off between “intra-party democracy” and “polity democracy” since candidates must be more attentive to “primary voters” than to citizens in general. As a corollary of the latter position, it is also argued that party primaries are an electoral hindrance. Almost all these debates are still open for several reasons. Firstly, getting data on internal party practices is not an easy task. Primaries, outside the USA and some other country, are still empirically under-studied. Secondly, there are different kinds of “primary elections” depending on, for example, who can vote and for what kind of office a candidate is selected. Perhaps different kinds of primaries have different origins and different consequences, so asking what the “pros” and “cons” of primaries in general are is not a very productive endeavour. Finally, studies about primaries have the same tendency as other studies about party organization to ignore if party ideology matters. Are Left parties more prone than rightwing parties to adopt primaries, or at least to be the first ones to do so? In this paper we take a step back in order to avoid “jumping to explanations”. First, by using a cross-national dataset built by the author, we offer an overview of the primary phenomenon across all democracies. We then focus on “primaries” for selecting the “party leader” of the main political parties in parliamentary democracies, also known as O.M.O.V (“one member, one vote”) procedures in some countries. In the paper we will answer the following questions: • How frequent, and since when, are these kind of primaries used among parliamentary democracies? • How is the diffusion process across countries? Is there any regional diffusion trend? • How is the diffusion process within countries? Is there any systematic difference between those parties who are the first ones in adopting primaries and those who follow suit? • Is the adoption of primaries an irreversible phenomenon? If not, when do parties abandon them? As a result, this paper offers a contribution to several aspects the workshop on “Party primaries in Europe: consequences and challenges”. This includes uncovering the rational behind the adoption of primaries for leadership selection, and uncovering potential effects on distribution of power within parties, on leadership dynamics, and electoral results. Finally it also seeks to be a complement to in-depth case studies. Our general overview can be used to know if a specific case is within the norm or is rather an outlier.