Camille Kelbel

What Citizens Want in Terms of Intra-Party Democracy: Popular Attitudes towards Alternative Candidate Selection Procedures:

Reforms of intra-party decision-making processes often rest on the idea that citizens want more direct say in these processes, but empirical data to support this claim are scarce. Using original data from the 2014 PartiRep voter survey in Belgium, this article explores the extent to which citizens support alternative intra-party processes. It shows that voters have heterogeneous preferences in terms of candidate selection procedures and that these are not random. ‘Disaffected’ citizens tend to support open procedures, whereas critical citizens tend to prefer closed selectorates, that is, intra-party actors. It also finds that voters’ preferences for intra-party models of democracy match their preferences for models of democracy at the system level. Our findings confirm that citizens do have clear preferences for how parties should organise and that these match their general views on how democracy should work.

‘I bend, indeed, but never break’: Formal rules and informal processes of candidate selection for European elections

Many of the criticisms commonly made of modern political parties concern their alleged lack of transparency and use of informality in their inner organization. Yet, little is known about the extent to which parties really bend their rules. This article investigates whether and how political parties use informality in one central aspect of intra-party life: candidate selection. More specifically, selection procedures for European elections are examined since party actions at the European level are still under little scrutiny from the media and the voters, hence granting them much leeway. To compare rules with practices, actors and levels cited in 51 party statutes are matched with their uses in 2014, gathered through a survey and interviews of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Even though informal processes are found to be generally less inclusive than the rules prescribed, divergences are often modest, suggesting that parties do not necessarily rely on informality in their day-to-day functioning.