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01-06-2015

Primaries: the unifying force

Authors: Rafael Hortala-Vallve, Hannes Mueller

Published in: Public Choice | Issue 3-4/2015

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Abstract

We present a formal model of intra-party politics to explain candidate selection within political parties. We think of parties as heterogeneous groups of individuals who aim to implement a set of policies but who differ in their priorities. When party heterogeneity is too great, parties are in danger of splitting into smaller yet more homogeneous political groups. In this context we argue that primaries can have a unifying role if the party elite cannot commit to policy concessions. Our model shows how three factors interact to create incentives for the adoption of primary elections, namely (1) the alignment in the preferred policies of various factions within a party, (2) the relative weight of each of these factions and (3) the electoral system. We discuss the existing empirical literature and demonstrate how existing studies can be improved in light of our theoretical predictions to provide a new, structured perspective on the adoption of primary elections.

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See, for example, Aldrich (1995), Besley (2005), Levy (2004), Roemer (2001).

See Adams and Merrill (2008), Serra (2011, 2013) or Aragon (2009). Mierowitz (2005) sees primaries as a mechanism that allows screening voters’ preferences rather than candidates’ qualities.

For an early discussion see, for example, North and Weingast (1989).

Boix and Svolik (2013) argue that institutionalized power-sharing within dictatorships could follow a similar logic.

Our model remains silent on other non-policy consequences of primaries, such as the electoral bonus of calling a primary (Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006) or the greater factionalization when calling a primary (Key 1949).

Lee et al. (2004) argue that citizen candidate models account better for what actually happens in elections than Downsian models. Put differently, parties select candidates that implement their own preferred policy instead of selecting policies that are implemented by their candidates.

The rationale behind this simplifying assumption is that, relative to other selection methods, primaries have the tendency to take power away from the party elite.

In Sect. 5 we show the robustness of our results when considering a one-dimensional policy space.

The probabilities of winning the election capture a large set of models we might have in mind. For example, it could be the case that when the party splits, its voters perfectly coordinate by voting for one of the factions in order to avoid a large gain by the opposing party.

A possible example is the presence of a non-democratically elected elite that has been in power for many years while the policy preference of the party’s core supporters has shifted. The socialist party in Spain (PSOE) was, until the last leadership change in July 2014, an example of such a situation.

In order to illustrate the proposition’s result, it is best to write the two conditions in terms of y. They read as follows: \(y\; < \;\frac{1 - \alpha x}{1 - x}\;and\;y\; < \;\frac{(\alpha - 1)x}{1 - x}.\)

Their measure of this divergence is the difference between the Berry state citizen ideology score (a weighted average of the Democrat and Republican representatives’ scores) and the Berry-based Democratic elite ideology score.

In their cross-country section, Kemahlioglu et al. (2009) code the thresholds for preventing runoff elections as zero, one and two respectively. A higher likelihood of a runoff can be interpreted as a lower α and our theory suggests a non-monotonic effect on the aggregate use of primaries. However, their empirical design treats the effect of this variable as monotonic and finds no significant impact on the use of primaries. Instead, they find a negative relationship when bunching the values of zero and one and comparing them with two. Our theory suggests that this finding should become stronger when comparing the values of one and two, and weaker or even opposite between zero and one.

For instance, see Obler (2009) for a discussion of primary elections in Belgium.

Empirically this seems to be the case; see Lee et al. (2004).

A future avenue of research could analyze further the institutionalization of primaries as a more irreversible change than a policy concession. This establishes an interesting link to the work of Levy (2004), who models parties as commitment devices.

See Acemoglu and Robinson (2005) for an analogous discussion.

That this effect is not unrealistic is shown by Obler (2009) in his analysis of the introduction of primaries in Belgium. Obler argues that the Christian Social Party did not adopt primaries when the elite perceived the likely winner of the primaries to be more extreme.

The fact that primaries are more likely when the dissenting faction is centrist is related to results in Gerber and Morton (1998) and Jackson et al. (2007) where we observe that more open selection induces more centrist policies.

See Tufte (1973). For an excellent review of this literature, see Taagepera and Shugart (1989).

Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. (2005). Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Title: Primaries: the unifying force
Authors: Rafael Hortala-Vallve
Hannes Mueller
Publication date: 01-06-2015
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Public Choice / Issue 3-4/2015
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-015-0249-8

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