What’s on a Party Member’s Mind? Voting Motives in Competitive Party Leadership Elections

ABSTRACT

Procedures of party leadership selection have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, but voting motives of party members in leadership elections have not been fully studied yet. This paper presents a new model of voting in party leadership elections that is inspired by previous models that were mostly tailored to more exclusive selectorates (such as the parliamentary party). We adopt an inductive research strategy that is based on an open question in member surveys that were held on the occasion of three Belgian party leadership elections. As a result, we obtain a comprehensive model with eight different vote motivations: policy positions, electability, competence, perceptions of personality traits, socio-demographic characteristics, personal relationships, party-organisational reasons and negative voting. Our findings also show that the kinds of motivations that are put forward by members are dependent upon the number of contenders.

KEYWORDS:

• Party leaders
• leadership selection
• party members
• voting motives
• Belgium

Acknowledgements

Our gratitude goes to Raf Reuse, Maxime Vandenberghe and Lorenzo Terrière for helping us with the coding of the data. We also wish to thank the participants to the panel ‘Party Leadership Selection: Beyond the Formal Rules’ at the 2020 virtual ECPR General Conference for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In fact, Seddone et al. (2020) call these motives ‘political values’. As they correspond to what we call ‘policy positions’ and in order to maintain consistency in the labels that we use throughout the article, we here already use the term ‘policy positions’. The same applies for ‘personality characteristics’ which we label ‘personality traits’

2 Quinn (2016) used a YouGov survey asking Labour supporters which two or three, if any, of the following were the main reasons they would vote for (chosen candidate): will be best opposition to Conservatives, has best policies for the country, has best policies for people like me, has best chance of winning in 2020, is a break from New Labour and Blair years, will unite party, is a break from Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

In their study, Seddone et al. (2020) asked the following question: ‘Which is the main motivation for voting for the candidate you supported in this primary election?’ They provided respondents with four possible answers: (a) ‘the candidate represents my political values’, (b) ‘I endorse his/her project for the party’, (c) ‘I appreciate his/her personal characteristics’, (d) ‘I want someone able to win next general elections’.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Special Research Fund [Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds] of Ghent University [grant number BOF. PDO.2018.0032.01].

Notes on contributors

Bram Wauters

Bram Wauters is an associate professor at the Department of Political Sciences of Ghent University, where he leads the research group GASPAR. His research interests include political representation, elections and political parties, with special attention to diversity. He has recently published on these topics in journals such as European Journal of Political research, Political Studies, and Political Research Quarterly. He is co-editor (with Knut Heidar) of ‘Do parties still represent?’ (Routledge, 2019). E-mail: [email protected].

Nicolas Bouteca

Nicolas Bouteca is an associate professor at the research group GASPAR of the Department of Political Sciences of Ghent University. His main research interests concern parties, ideology, party competition and federalism. He has recently published on these topics in Political Studies, Party Politics and Lex Localis.

Anna Kern

Anna Kern is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science of Ghent University. Her main research interests include political participation, political equality and political legitimacy. Her work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as West European Politics, Local Government Studies, Social Science Research and Political Behavior.

Audrey Vandeleene

Audrey Vandeleene is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Sciences of Ghent University and lecturer at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her research interests cover party politics, intra-party democracy, electoral systems, women-in-politics and federalism.