A personalisation effect? Party leaders and candidate selection

One of the most important functions performed by parties has always been candidate selection. Indeed, political parties still play a fundamental gatekeeping role in selecting candidates and, consequently, in selecting parliamentary and governmental elites. The academic literature on the topic has extensively analysed the rules governing this process and its consequences in different areas of research, such as legislative behaviour, political careers, or representation styles. Nonetheless, a central area of research has received much less attention: the effective autonomy of party leaders in candidate selection. Indeed, much more attention has been devoted to rules governing candidate selection rather than practices impacting such a process, especially from a comparative viewpoint. This is an interesting area to investigate also considering recent accounts of more personalised politics, where (party) leaders and candidates have allegedly become more central in various democratic representative processes. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an analysis of the determinants of the autonomy of party leaders in selecting candidates for general elections in Western Europe in the past few decades. It will use a comprehensive dataset including information for circa 60 Western European parties and their leaders between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s. More specifically, the paper will investigate the effect of party leaders’ features (e.g., being a Prime Minister or leaders’ gender), leaders’ electoral performance in office, and parties’ characteristics (i.e., ideology) on leaders’ autonomy in candidate selection before each general election. The empirical analysis will help to shed new light on a crucial intra-party phenomenon and open up new avenues of research in many fields, including party politics, legislative behaviour, and political elites.