Stacking the Deck: A Theory of Party Control of Primary Elections

• In Event: Structure and Leadership of Political Parties

Abstract

Over recent decades, an increasing number of political parties around the world have adopted primary elections to nominate their candidates to office. Although in theory primaries are expected to constrain party elites' influence over candidate selection, there is extensive qualitative evidence that suggest party leaders exert considerable influence even when primaries are used. In this paper, I develop a formal model of intraparty politics and electoral competition to study when and how party leaders interfere in primaries. I evaluate the main implications of theory using an original dataset on legislative primaries in Mexico. The results show that an important type of party elites — state governors — reduce the number of aspirants who enter the primary and increase the primary winner's margin of victory. Additional evidence suggests these patterns are driven by governors (1) investing resources into electoral mobilization and (2) tampering with the lists of registered primary voters.

Author

• Sergio J Ascencio, University of Essex