Party Members’ Power: Conjoint Experiment on Parties’ Decision-Making

This article employs a conjoint experiment to systematically investigate the preferences of English political party members regarding internal decision-making processes. Addressing a gap in the literature on party politics, the study explores members' perspectives on procedural and organisational aspects of their influence within the party. Amid a broader crisis of representation in Western democracies, the need for political parties to redefine their societal connections through enhanced intra-party democracy has become increasingly pressing. The research examines the preferences of the members of the two biggest English parties, the Conservative and the Labour party, regarding some of the most relevant features of party decision-making. The conjoint experiment presented respondents with hypothetical party profiles featuring randomly assigned decision-making attributes, including the selection of leaders and candidates, decision-making processes, membership types, and the inclusion of minorities through quotas. The sample comprises 1’200 members of the two parties, ensuring robust representation within the English majoritarian electoral system. This comprehensive approach disentangles the relationship between the parties’ status quo and members’ preferences, enabling comparative analysis across parties and members’ categories. In particular, the article investigates whether members seek to increase or limit their influence within the party and identifies variations in decision-making model preferences. The findings provide critical insights into party organisation and intra-party democracy, shedding light on members' attitudes toward procedural reforms. These insights contribute to ongoing debates on enhancing political parties' representativeness, responsiveness, participation, and legitimacy in contemporary democracies.