“Who are they voting for? Party members’ preferences in candidates”

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Abstract:

A growing body of literature assesses the causes and consequences of inclusive candidate selections, termed primaries, in Western Europe. At the same time, little is still known about the process of primaries. Previous research employed party-member level explanations to explain the selection (or lack thereof) of female candidates and ideologically extreme candidates but rarely investigated the motivations of party members directly. Thus, in this study, we develop theoretical arguments about what party members value in primary candidates, focusing on the potentially competing party goals, such as vote-seeking, policy-seeking, and unity-seeking, as well as the importance of socio-economic characteristics. Particularly, we argue that party members have a preference for candidates that are close to them in ideology, but also value candidates’ commitment to party unity and their electability, thus challenging previous arguments that party members are (mainly) policy-goal seeking. These arguments are empirically tested using a conjoint experiment with party members of the green party Ecolo in Belgium, in which party members rank candidates according to their preferences. As such, this paper contributes to a nascent literature on the process of primaries, which will also allow for a more nuanced study of the consequences of primaries.

Jana Schwenk is a researcher at the Department of Political Science at Gothenburg University.