Party leadership selection and party leaders’ powers: Empowered grassroots or leader-centric parties?

Abstract This paper explores whether parties’ leadership selection procedures carry broader implications for intraparty power. Prior scholarship has documented an ongoing shift in the ways that parties select their leaders, with a growing tendency to include grassroots supporters in such decisions, sometimes described as ‘plebiscitary intraparty democracy’. Some have portrayed moves towards more inclusive leadership selection as part of a more general shift towards the empowerment of individual party members and supporters; others have dismissed it as mere window dressing, and part of a trend towards more leader-centric parties. This study investigates these relationships, asking whether the extent of grassroots involvement in party leadership selection procedures in contemporary democracies relates in any way to the broader distribution of formal powers within parties. Contrary to some sceptics, we find no support for the argument that parties with bottom-up forms of leadership selection generally grant greater formal powers to leaders. Rather, the opposite, in fact: moreover, parties that use inclusive leadership selection procedures also tend to use plebiscitary methods across a wider array of intraparty decision-making procedures. Thus, the highly publicized spread of inclusive leadership contests can be seen as a symptom of wider shifts in the norms and practices of intraparty governance.