Suchergebnisse

Under what conditions do oppositional politicians in Western parliamentarian democracies repeat as candidates after losing their first election? Political leaders need to attain the highest executive offices to lead. But in most democracies this means that parties must previously select them as their candidates for those offices. Parties' intervention in candidate selection is thus a vital part of the game. However, this is still an understudied topic in Western parliamentarian politics. A few studies have analyzed losers' fate, but they have exclusively focused on the US case where party machines have played for long a lesser role in leadership recruitment. This paper seeks therefore to make a contribution to the literature about the current role of party organizations for political leadership survival in party-centered parliamentarian countries by studying the specific case of candidates for the presidency of the Spanish Comunidades Autonómas. ; This study has been possible thanks to a research grant of the Instituto Carlos III-Juan March de Ciencias Sociales.

SEBASTIAN EDWARDS: Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promiseof Populism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

The economic crisis of the beginning of this century in Latin America has questioned that a neo-liberal kind of populism may solve the puzzle of how to implement pro-market economic reforms by democratic regimes in less developed countries. Populism is both prone to corruption and incompatible with the necessary institutional reforms (the "second generation" reforms) complementing the economic reforms. Non-populist politicians may not have this handicap, but they could not overcome the labor resistance to their pro-market reforms either. Still, under certain conditions, democratic politicians can implement these reforms without suffering from the costs of populism. ; Las crisis económicas de comienzos de este siglo en América Latina han cuestionado que el populismo, en su versión neoliberal, pueda ser la solución para llevar a cabo las reformas económicas pro-mercado por los regímenes democráticos de los países menos desarrollados. Tanto la tentación de cualquier clase de populismo de caer en una corrupción que las haga estériles, como su incompatibilidad con las necesarias reformas institucionales, de "segunda generación", que complementen a las económicas, es muy alta. Los políticos no populistas no tendrían este problema, pero tampoco podrían hacer frente a la oposición sindical. Ahora bien, bajo ciertas condiciones, los políticos democráticos las pueden llevar a cabo sin tener que caer en los costes del populismo.

This paper examines the effect of party primaries on women's chances of winning a leadership contest in eight Western parliamentary countries since 1985. By doing so, we revisit an ongoing debate about a possible trade-off between the democratic values of 'inclusion' of party members and 'representation' of excluded groups that this type of selection method may involve. Using an original data set consisting of 608 candidates who participated in 168 leadership mixed-gender contests at the national or regional level, we show that female candidates perform worse under party primaries. This finding holds even after controlling for the type of candidate competing. We therefore sustain the argument that this leadership selection mechanism, in its current format, involves a trade-off between 'inclusion' and 'representation'.

AbstractThis article revisits the foundations of prior research on the effects of plebiscitarian selection mechanisms on candidates' electoral strength. While previous studies do not nest political parties' decision making, the authors argue that party primary effects entail the interdependence of party procedures for candidate selection. The article assesses the validity of the two approaches. Using original data from seven parties and 296 regional elections in Canada, Germany and Spain, and from sixty-two pre-election polls in Germany and Spain, it shows that, other things equal, primary-selected candidates are not stronger than those selected by other procedures. However, there is evidence of a penalty for parties that do not select candidates by primary when their main rival does, in particular when the primary election is not divisive and is held closer to the general election.

AbstractThis research provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the gender politics of the springboards to chief executive office. The extremely masculinised composition of the relatively few top national executive positions has posed a serious impediment to empirically assessing the conditions that may facilitate women's under‐representation and men's over‐representation. To overcome this constraint, this study looks at the top regional executive office across four West European countries that present a multilevel state structure – namely Austria, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. Using two original datasets, the article examines the ways in which the selection and reselection of regional prime ministerial candidates is shaped by individual, organisational and institutional factors that produce heterogeneous experiences and career opportunities across sex. The results show that women have not shattered the glass ceiling at the regional level and pinpoint the fact that they are held to higher standards, benefit less from the political resources they possess and are more dependent on the decision environment in which parties select executive candidates. The conclusion is that the rules of the game guiding selection and reselection processes are strongly biased towards men.

In many Western democracies, political parties have started to open to members the selection of their leaders. While most studies focus on the introduction of this new selection method, its subsequent practice is still understudied. The article contributes to our still limited knowledge of this process by looking at two multilevel countries, Germany and Spain, where the mainstream parties have sometimes organized membership ballots, especially at the regional level, for leadership selection. Thanks to two original databases on party conferences and membership ballots, the article analyzes the background of this process and reviews the most common explanations offered by the literature. It shows that they are not held when parties want to regain power, or party chairs seek their nomination, as commonly believed, but when there are intraparty leadership disputes.