Party Candidate Selection
The choice before the choice
This is a post in my constitutional design series
I’ve previously covered the topic of electoral systems, different ways to decide which party wins spots as leader or in the legislature. But this is only half the problem of how politicians are elected. The other, less discussed but in my view equally important half is how you decide which candidates the party puts forward. That’s what this post is about. It’s a long one, but I think its length is warranted for how important and complex a topic it is, and there wasn’t a super natural place to split the piece in two.
Why This Piece Exists
In most countries, candidate selection is left over to the parties themselves. So that’s it, just let the parties decide - piece over, right? Not so fast.
Even if you let the parties themselves decide, it’s still worth it to think about what the “best” decisions are. Many people use appeals to democracy to justify primaries or appeals to organization to justify elite selection, and it’s worth understanding how to evaluate these claims in light of broader constitutional design considerations.
There are also useful resources that the state can lend to parties for candidate selection, even if the parties decide whether they want to use them. The state can help facilitate primaries, for instance, instead of forcing the parties to figure out how to ensure secret ballot, accessible voting, and minimal fraud. The state can provide financing to parties to help them select candidates.
Or maybe you don’t want to let the parties decide how to select candidates! You might think that candidate selection is a problem of such importance that it’s worth the state mandating a process to ensure that it’s good or fair.
I’ll talk about how much you’d want the state to intervene at the end of this piece, but I thought I’d preface the piece with this as it’s many people’s gut reaction to this question.
The Party
A political party is an organization with two main functions. For low-info voters, it lets them easily assess a candidate’s political views without having to look into them further. For high-info voters, parties allow those with common political views to coalesce around certain candidates for a general election. Parties are a natural phenomenon; if they were banned, they would re-emerge informally in the form of elite endorsements that are used as issue agreement proxies by voters.
On the one hand, you want party unity, so that people know what the political views of the party they’re voting for are. On the other hand, you don’t want too much unity, or else you lose many of the advantages of legislatures that I wrote about in this post (namely, that they’re pluralist and moderate). It’s particularly important that a party is not totally beholden to its leader, as this increases the randomness of a legislature’s views and can lead to dictatorship.
As ever in this series, what I’d like are dials you can adjust based on your preference for diversity vs. uniformity. There are two good ones. The first is changing who selects the candidate, which I’ll call the “selectorate” based on this paper (though I use it slightly differently here). When you make the selectorate more exclusive, more open just to those who are engaged or connected enough in the party, you’ll tend to get much more uniform views. The second is the electoral system - how proportional vs. majoritarian it is. This second one obviously doesn’t apply to selecting candidates for a single leader.
The Selectorate
Public
These are primaries. The pros of them are:
They’re democratic, which means the views of politicians more accurately reflect public will.
As I discussed in my piece on direct democracy, you probably don’t want politicians to be able to freeze out the public view if there’s bipartisan elite consensus on an unpopular position, and primaries are a way of preventing this.
They help avoid “backroom politics” in deciding who gets to be a candidate, which can select for corrupt and otherwise ruthless politicians
They’re a good way to ensure party diversity in a legislature, particularly if you pick a good electoral system.
The main con is that direct primaries select for candidates who are popular among the primary electorate, rather than those who are better at governing in good and popular ways. In this way, they can undermine accountability democracy as well as just generally leading to bad governance.
One other con of direct primaries from the party’s perspective is that primary winners are likely worse at campaigning for a general election as well. When elites choose candidates, particularly a candidate for leader, they are very concerned about winning the general election; the public not so much. Whether this is a con from a constitutional design perspective kind of depends on how you view campaigning.
The options for public selectorate differ primarily in their level of exclusivity, how much they select for engagement. As stated before, a more exclusive selectorate will lead to more uniformity. It’ll also tend to lead to more extreme candidates (see here) and candidates that appeal more to people of high socioeconomic status.
Party Voters
The most inclusive possibility for the selectorate is everyone who voted for the party.
The basic way of doing this is to host primaries where people who voted for the party last election, or maybe in the last few elections, can vote. With closed-list PR or with presidential democracy, you can even get fancy and host the general election before the primary, so first you decide how many seats each party gets / which party gets the president spot and then the parties decide which candidates takes those spots.
The hard part is checking who voted for the party. There is a good way of doing this that preserves secret ballot - hand voters a usb stick or barcode which contains an encoded version of who they voted for, and let them use it as they vote in the primary. But you (and the public) have to trust that the government will do this correctly, and if not it can make people uncomfortable and lead to social pressure to vote for certain candidates in the general election.
The other way to implement primaries for all party voters is just to use an electoral system that allows people to vote for not just a party but candidates within that party; see my electoral systems post for more about that.
Party Members
If you find the logistical issues of party voters too difficult, or if you want a more exclusive system, you can opt for party membership as the requirement for getting a vote in candidate selection.
You want to make sure that party members are actual supporters of the party. Otherwise, nobody has any incentive to vote in their own party’s primary: they should strategically vote in whatever primary would be most beneficial. Voting in a primary for a party you don’t support is called crossover voting. I’m impressed by how rare it is in the US, but its existence is obviously a design flaw, as it means the parties wouldn’t necessarily have common beliefs.
There are a number of different requirements for becoming a party member to ensure this:
Fees
Length of party affiliation
Sponsorship by a party member (ie, someone else attests that you are a committed party member)
Party activity (attending local party meetings or campaign events)
Each of these selects for party engagement to a different extent. Most also select for other attributes that I think are undesirable: fees select for wealth, sponsorship selects for sociability, party activity selects for outgoingness as well as availability (which tends to correlate with age) and living in an area with lots of events (which tends to be urban areas, area where the party has lots of support, swing region with lots of campaign events).
The most commonly used one and the one I think you should probably opt for is fees. By paying a fee, you’re hopefully helping the party win elections, so you shouldn’t do it unless you’re actually a supporter. I also think a fee creates a sort of coordination problem that discourages crossover voting. In order for it to be worth it to pay a fee to the other party and vote in their primary, you have to be assured that your vote will actually matter, else that’s just money you’re giving up. This becomes more obviously worth it if you adopt a proportional system (which I think you should, as I’ll get to in a bit), but still the effect remains at least somewhat.
(Even in a winner-take-all environment, the effect isn’t perfect; crossover voting becomes more worth it when the party you’re considering voting in is closely divided and you just have to help push a candidate over the edge, or when you have a bunch of legacy party members who are now more crossover voters but haven’t yet ceased their membership).
To give you a sense of how fees look like in practice, in the countries I looked at, the base fee ranged from $20 to $120 annually, often with lower fees for certain groups (eg young people) and higher for higher income people. In most places, the fee is the only requirement for becoming a party member (beyond non-binding stuff like alleging that you support the party’s principles). In places where they charge a fee, party membership is somewhat rare. Here is a chart I could find for membership in the late 1990s, and note also that party membership has been in steady decline:
There is still the issue of poor people not being able to pay the fee. You can get around commensurate to their income for party membership and then compensating parties with government money at a fixed rate for the number of members they have. I quite like this mechanism.
There is also another issue, which is that fees may not actually help a party win elections that much, so it might be worth it to pay a fee and vote in a primary for a party you don’t actually support. You can try to get around this a bit by adopting tight restrictions on the ability of parties to raise money by other means, though as I talked about in this piece that might be hard to do.
Other than fees, I think length of party affiliation is a no-brainer, with some exception for young people who cannot have been affiliated with a party for a long time. Sponsorship by party members or party activity are I think options to explore as optional alternative routes to becoming a party member alongside fees, rather than extra requirements in addition to fees, as I think their selection effects can be really bad.
Voting at Party Meetings
Instead of making attending local party meetings a prerequisite for voting in the primary, you can have the voting take place at the local party meetings themselves. In the US these are called caucuses.
This has the same selection effects of making attendance a prerequisite for party membership. It also has the downside that you don’t have secret ballot, which means people can be socially pressured to vote for certain candidates. The main upside I can see compared to a party membership prerequisite is that it opens up potential flexibility to pursue different voting systems like single-transferable vote (STV), as you can explain the system to members before they vote and people can discuss all the candidates with each other.
I should also mention open conventions, which are like massive party meetings. Like party meetings, they have the draw of potentially opening up more advanced voting systems. They’re used mainly because they’re just much logistically easier than a whole caucus or primary system, but I think the massive selection effects make it just a bad option unless you really logistically can’t do anything else, perhaps for really tiny parties
Party Elites
The alternative to letting the public select candidates is giving power to party elites. This has the opposite pros and cons to direct primaries.
When a party is not new, elite selection is mostly a form of continuity. You expect the candidates last time to be mostly the same as the candidates this time. This can be a good way of ensuring a central long-lasting party ideology. Of course these same people can change their minds on an issue, particularly if there’s incentive to do so to win the general election, but it’ll generally be the same people. The only way to break this continuity is to let the public in.
With a new party, the elites are basically whoever started the party. When Nigel Farage started the party Reform UK, he and his close friends get to choose who the candidates are.
Party Leader
Giving power to the party leader is the single biggest way of promoting uniformity within a party.
Because of randomness, it could be that the leader has a less “pure” version of the ideology that the party espouses, and thus actually it’s not the best way of ensuring a uniform vision that people can vote for. But I think people generally associate the views of the party with the views of its leader, so I think it really does promote a uniform vision. The leader also likely comes from the biggest faction of the party and so is more likely to be representative of the party’s majority view.
National Politicians
This is the purest form of a feedback loop that promotes continuity - politicians select candidates that become the party’s next politicians. (Likely with a level of indirection in between, which I’ll touch on in a bit).
Legislative Party Leadership
This is mostly the same as giving power to the party leader, just for a few people rather than just one person. The main difference is that the party leader can be chosen by the public (more on that in a bit), breaking the continuity, while legislative party leadership never is.
Local Politicians
Having local politicians select candidates is a way of making politicians more in touch with local issues, which can be a pro or a con.
How it affects big-picture factional disputes depends on how these local politicians are chosen, which opens up this same conversation but on the local level.
Indirection
Instead of having the selectorate choose candidates directly, you can have them select a candidate committee that then chooses the candidate. This is what’s done in most countries. (You can have even more layers of indirection, like having this committee choose party leadership that chooses candidates, but I think generally there’s not much point). For elites, this is useful so they don’t have to take the time to learn about every single candidate. For the public, this is primarily useful when things aren’t split up neatly into single member districts where everyone focuses just on the candidate in their own district, and so you need some central committee to select a slate of national candidates. Because single-member districts don’t allow for any sort of diversity unless certain factions are clustered geographically, I think this is a must-have.
New Parties
New parties are where I think candidate selection for a legislature becomes tricky.
You want to prevent a party leader from totally dominating their party with some sort of restrictions on candidate selection. The issue is that a popular party leader can always start a new party if they feel like the restrictions are making their party’s candidates too disloyal. Then, they can appoint loyal elites, and will likely have a loyal base that follows them to their new party as party members - thereby essentially bypassing restrictions. This is especially a problem if a leader has been around for a long time so they can determine which elites are loyal to them and which are not.
How likely this bypassing is depends a lot on the inter-party electoral system used. If it’s a proportional system with low thresholds, the leader can reliably get some votes for their new party, but they may not be able to take all their voters with them. If it’s more of a majoritarian system, the leader may be able to totally replace their old party if they get enough voters, or they might never gain enough traction to get any seats at all.
The most direct way of addressing this loophole is to put a cap on the number of seats that a new party can win. This is like a threshold but with a max rather than a min; as with min thresholds you use ranked voting to prevent votes above the cap from being wasted. This forces a party to grow over time rather than immediately get a majority. In practice, this shouldn’t matter that much: growing over time is what a new party does most of the time anyway, it’s rare for a party to immediately get a majority.
This system isn’t totally theoretically sound. Instead of running as a new party, a popular party leader can create a number of different separate parties, appointing loyal servants as heads of the other ones. The simplest way of doing this would be to have regional parties, and then either run these parties in different places (if using geographic districts) or just encourage voters in different regions to pick their respective regional parties and then rank the other regional parties after.
To get around this, you can set a fairly high min threshold for new parties as well to create a very narrow range for a party to aim for, so that a leader has to split their supporters very evenly to get a significant chunk of the vote, which would be very difficult. A min threshold of 10% and max of 15%, for example, or maybe even a min/max both of 15% to simplify things. If all voters of the new party rank an established party second, there should be no wasted votes. Then you can disallow ranked voting from pushing a new party above the min threshold (ie don’t allow votes to be redistributed to a new party that hasn’t made the threshold based on first-place votes) in order to stop the two regional parties from simply ranking each other second and using ranked voting to distribute the votes evenly between them.
If you’re using a really high threshold or a two-party electoral system, this doesn’t exactly work of course because 15% means no seats at all. In that case you should just not allow a party to get any seats at all if they got less than 15% of the first-round vote last election.
Aside from this mechanism, I think you should rely more on the public as the selectorate for a new party than elites, as the elites are chosen directly by the leader themselves and are thus likely to be more loyal. And besides that, I think to some extent you just have to rely on the public and elites not being endlessly loyal to a new party leader. As long as there is some minority of the party that shows real independence, that can be enough to add important diversity.
Recommendation
For electing a single party leader, I think you should opt either for public primaries for all party members or selection by legislators - I don’t think anything else makes sense. You can even do something in between where legislators narrow it down to a few people and party members select among them, or vice versa, more on that in the next part.
For legislators, I think the cleanest way of approaching candidate selection is to have a candidate selection committee of like 30 people selected by whatever means you want - appointed by the leader, by legislators, by party members, etc. One other benefit of a committee is that you can combine delegates chosen by different means, some by party members and some by elites, which is what parties in most countries do. A good system would maybe be that 30% of delegates are chosen by the leader, another 30% by current legislators, and the other 40% chosen proportionally by party legislators. If it’s a new party, you could make it 30% leader and 70% public - I think the public part is crucial to prevent a leader from totally dominating a party. You could also easily make this multiple regional candidate committees instead, where the percentages hold for each individual committee.
I would make the candidate selection for the legislature proportional, as I’ll get to in the second part, and this fraction selected by the leader would be my main way of introducing majoritarianism to promote uniformity.
Electoral Systems
This is the second part of my post on party candidate selection. The first part was about the “who” - who makes up the selectorate that chooses the candidates. This part is about the “how” - how you translate the selectorate’s preferences into candidate choices. I’m going to make my posts on (inter-party) for a single person and for a legislature required reading for this part; I’m going to reference them a lot.
Single Leader
There are two parts to candidate selection: whittling the field down to a few people, and then deciding among them. What I’ll say here applies to both if you have direct primaries for the leader or if you let the party’s legislators choose them. You can even mix and match and have the first part done by party leaders and the second by legislators, or even vice versa. If you have the second part done by the public, in parliamentary democracy you can even implement it during the general election if you want the selectorate to be all of a party’s voters: people choose which party they would like to see take office, and simultaneously vote for a leader of that party. This is kind of a weird thing to do - since you don’t know who the leader is going to be until the election, people don’t know exactly who they’re voting for, and you also can’t give the leader extra power in candidate selection - but it’s possible.
The way to implement the first round is to use FPTP and have the top X candidates from one round, or maybe all candidates that get above Y% of the vote, make it to the next round. Maybe this system could be good: a first round using FPTP with a 5% threshold to advance, and then a potential second round to whittle it down to 4 candidates (if more than 4 advance from round 1).
The hope is that once you’re down to a few people, the voting system you use for the second part won’t matter that much. Things should be a lot less factional at the party level than in a general election, so the plurality winner, the condorcet winner, the utilitarian winner (not used in an ethical sense but in a voter satisfaction sense, see my post on electoral systems), etc. should hopefully be the same person.
Unfortunately, sometimes things are quite factional. Sometimes, for example, there is one really polarizing figure that emerges as a frontrunner - Trump 2016, for example - and the public splits for and against them. In these cases, I don’t think it’s clear what you should do; I could see a case for any of the single-member systems I talked about in my post on electoral systems. I think the “ideal” for party selection selection is probably to choose the utilitarian winner - this is the person who I think can best said to “unify” the party. For this reason I’d go with score voting, which hopefully should lead to the utilitarian winner if people are honest, and if people are strategic it’ll lead to the something between the condorcet and plurality winners, neither of which are terrible.
Committee Selection
By The Public
As stated previously, I’d like for there to be publicly elected members of the central candidate selection committee in charge of selecting legislative candidates. I’d like this to be proportional, with the majoritarianism part introduced by the other leader-selected delegates.
I would have these members chosen by a direct multi-member electoral system like single transferable vote (STV) or proportional approval vote (PAV). If you have more than 5 members, you can have this take place in many different districts. Alternatively, if you want more granularity, you can have the public elect a body of 100+ delegates in districts, and then have these delegates meet at a convention to select candidate committee members. In that case I really like my proportional multi-vote representatives (PMR) with districts of 10ish member votes for this.
Exact proportionality is less important on the party level (because the stakes of who gets a majority are lower), so I wouldn’t mind going down to 3 members per district if using STV or PAV in order to reduce exhausted ballots (ballots that go to waste because a voter didn’t rank or rate enough candidates). That said I also think 5 is ok for letting smaller factions take power.
I do worry that elected committee members aren’t going to be super representative of the public because people don’t know who these candidates are. There aren’t as many “issues” for delegates to run on because they don’t do as much. I am hopeful though that voters will be able to be able to assess things like whether a delegate is a “party insider” or “leader’s pet” or “random businessman”, which should be indicative of important factional disputes.
By Legislators
How you have legislators elect members of the committee is pretty flexible.
You could have them select members by STV or PAV in 1 big election. Alternatively, you could split the legislators up into groups and then have each group elect committee members by STV or PAV. Those groups perhaps being geographic regions if legislators are elected in districts, or if legislators are elected in a party list you could cut up the list somehow (eg spots 1,6,11,16 are 1 group, spots 2,7,12,17 are another,…). Or another thing you could do is just let the legislators manually sort themselves into groups and have each group unanimously agree on delegates proportional to how big it is.
I would use secret ballot for these elections.
Legislative Candidate Selection
Regardless of which inter-party system you use, you want to generate a ranking of legislative candidates: which candidates will be seated if a party gets 20% of the vote, which will be seated if it gets 40% of the vote, and which will be seated if they get 60% of the vote. For closed list PR, this is just the party list. For MMP, this is which candidates are in safe districts, which are in swing districts, and which are in long shot districts. For multi-member districts like STV, this ranking is handled by the voters themselves, by which candidates get more of the vote.
I’m ok with giving the leader’s committee members all the top spots on that ranking. (if you do that, maybe I’d reduce the number of delegates the leader gets, maybe 15% instead of 30%). But for the rest of them, I think they should be selected by the candidate committee proportionally. This preserves the proportionality of the elected delegates, which means we can neatly control the amount of majoritarianism through the amount of leader-selected delegates. More precisely, what I want is that not just that the overall ranking will be proportional, but that every contiguous sublist will be proportional. That way, no matter how many seats a party gets, the candidates will be selected proportionally to the delegates.
The easy way of doing this is to let each committee members select an equal number of candidates, and then interlace the candidate spots evenly. So if you have 30 committee members and a 60 candidate list, member 1 can get spots 1 and 31, member 2 can get spots 2 and 32, …, with some ranking for the committee members. If you give the leader’s committee members all the top spots, you would use this same system for deciding on committee spots between them. Once a committee member gets a spot in the ranking, they get to control which candidate is chosen for that spot. They might consult with other committee members, or with local party branches, but they are ultimately in charge of choosing that spot.
So that’s the method for when you have closed list PR as the inter-party electoral system. For inter-party mixed member proportional (MMP) or district-level closed-list PR, you essentially replicate this by letting the first place in the ranking choose any district (and get the top spot on that district’s list, for district level PR) first, then the second place gets to choose any district (and get the top remaining spot on that district’s list), then the third place, etc. People should choose the seats that are the safest first, and potentially the seats close geographically to them. If you want delegates to take the seats closest to them geographically, you can have this process take place in multiple regional candidate committees. Unfortunately, unless you have big regions - probably regions that are expected to elect 5 candidates *from that party* - you aren’t going to get a level of proportionality I think is acceptable. The only time I think this is potentially feasible is if you have a two-party inter-party system. (This is the only time I’d consider MMP anyway, so maybe then you could do it).
For inter-party multi-member systems like STV, you run into an issue. Since the voters themselves pick who the top spot on the list is, it’s likely that (if a district elects fewer candidates than the party nominates) the biggest faction of a party takes all the top spots. The only way around this is to let each committee member choose *all* the candidates in each district, which defeats some of the point of multi-member systems. Maybe you’re ok with sacrificing intra-party proportionality in these systems, but I’m not, which is why I generally dislike these systems.
State Intervention
The final question is how much of these processes the state should mandate.
If you have a proportional system with no/low threholds, I’m ok with keeping things a bit looser. But if you have high thresholds or plurality bonuses, I’m in favor of mandating a lot. In that case I think you should mandate at least:
That candidates are selected by one or more committees
That these committees are composed at least 70% of members elected by a party’s current legislators and/or the public.
That these committees choose candidates proportionally, satisfying the contiguous sublist proportionality I described, except at max 15% of candidates.
That the members selected by legislators are selected proportionally.
That publicly elected members are selected by a proportional system
That this “public” includes people in any geography (ie not a single convention, or if you have local party meetings you need them throughout the country).
I’m ok with mandating a lot more though - the proportional system you use, the exact percentages, etc.
I think if you don’t mandate, there are going to be different pressures that push candidate selection in different directions - elites will want to have more elite say, the public is going to want more public say, the largest faction will want a less proportional system and the smaller factions will want more - and there’s no guarantee you’ll get a good system out of it. This can seriously undermine democracy.