Candidate Selection and Party Discipline: A Comparative Perspective

Previous works have argued that candidate selection is an important determinant of discipline in parliamentary groups. Those candidates selected by party elites tend to be more disciplined than those selected following a more participative process. This idea has been tested measuring voting blocs (as a proxy of party discipline) and party rules (as indicators of the formal mechanisms of candidate selection). But these indicators do not consider the informal mechanisms behind candidate selection and the way in which decisions are taken inside parliamentary groups. Furthermore, the (scarce) research on this issue are case studies, forgetting the contextual elements behind this relation. In this paper we use data from a survey of representatives of 19 countries to study how candidate selection impacts the way in which representation (and discipline) is perceived by candidates. We compare European vs. non European countries and multilevel vs. centralized democracies. We demonstrate that exclusive candidate selection promote the conception of a more vertical (from the party elite to the candidates) way of decision making, while participative mechanisms of candidate selection generate less disciplined MPs without eroding internal cohesion of parliamentary groups.