Selecting party leaders

Abstract

This article revisits the foundations of previous research on the selection of party leaders. The authors argue that leader selection in party congresses entails two dimensions: fragmentation, or the number of candidates running for leadership, and dissent, or dissatisfaction with the winning candidate. Using original data from 435 regional party congresses of the two main national parties in Germany and Spain, the analysis shows that both the number of contenders and the support received by the winner depend on the party’s experience in government, but only the latter is (positively) affected by the party’s electoral performance. Additionally, upon examining the consequences of intraparty division, it is found that a party’s electoral performance is negatively impacted by the existence of several candidates fighting for leadership, while the support received by the leader in the party congress crucially influences their chances of becoming the top candidate in the next regional election.

Keywords:

• Elections
• intraparty division
• leader
• party congress
• political parties

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge support from the Spanish Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities (Grant number AEI/FEDER CSO2017-85024-C2-1-P), the Catalan Institut for Self-government Studies (IEA), and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) under the ICREA Academia programme.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interests.

Notes

1 Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU) in Bavaria.

2 Unión del Pueblo Navarro (UPN)-PP in Navarre.

3 In those cases where more than one party congress within the regional electoral cycle is held, we focus on the first one following the regional election when examining the causes of intraparty disagreement; when examining the consequences of intraparty disagreement, we concentrate on the last congress before the election.

4 In Germany, party leaders are required by law to be (re)selected at each biennial congress (Gruber  et al. 2015), while in Spain, parties’ statutes also regulate the term limit (usually around four years). Similarly, in Spain, party leaders are elected in a single round, but in Germany, a second round between the top two candidates is held if no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the first round. When a second round has been held, we use the election results of the second round.

5 For Germany, we exclude from our analysis those party congresses convened to formally ratify the candidate selected by party members in primaries (Detterbeck 2013).

6 The maximum number of observations we include in our estimates (Model 2 in Table 4) is 412. In some party congresses, the press or the parties’ documents did not provide information about the exact number of votes obtained by the winner and/or the number of contenders.

7 The ENC is calculated as $\frac{1}{\sum v_i^2}$ where $v_i$ is the percentage of the votes won by the $i^{th}$ candidate in the party congress.

8 We have also controlled for the number of days (divided by 100) elapsed between the corresponding regional election and the first congress after the election. An incumbent party leader could strategically decide the date of that congress taking into account the possible challengers and the dissent in the organisation. This variable does not significantly affect our two dependent variables and does not change our results qualitatively.

9 In Table A3 in the Online appendix, we have estimated a random-intercept-only model for the ENC and the Winner Vote Share using parties and regions (33 observations) and parties and countries (two observations) as levels. The intercept variance capturing the between-region and between-country variance is virtually 0. The resulting intraclass correlation coefficient is 0.000 for the two dependent variables when countries are the higher level and 0.013 for the ENC and 0.098 for the Winner Vote Share when regions are the higher level.

10 The data were obtained from the respective national institutes of statistics (the Bundesagentur für Arbeit in Germany and the Instituto Nacional de Estadística in Spain).

11 Party Regional Dummies are not included when examining the second hypothesis due to a problem of perfect multicollinearity.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Catalan Institut for Self-government Studies (IEA); Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA); Spanish Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities.

Notes on contributors

Ignacio Lago

Ignacio Lago is a Professor of Political Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests include federalism, electoral systems, political behaviour and party politics. He has published in Public Opinion Quarterly, the European Journal of Political Economy, American Politics Research, the European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, Party Politics and the British Journal of Political Science. His latest books are The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the Handbook on Decentralisation, Devolution and the State (Edward Elgar, 2021). [[email protected]]

Javier Astudillo

Javier Astudillo is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is the author of various works on interest groups and political parties published in several international journals such as Politics & Society, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, South European Society and Politics, Party Politics, the European Journal of Political Research and the British Journal of Political Science, among others. He is currently working on the relationship between party organisation and chief executives at national and regional levels in Western parliamentarian democracies. [[email protected]]