How Do Voters Reason about Intraparty Democracy? Constraints Rather than Influence

Widespread intraparty reforms empower party members and create coprincipalship with party voters. This alters the structure of democratic delegation and may lead to policy drift and ineffective accountability. Existing research is vague on how voters see this arrangement, and we therefore ask, What leads voters to accept coprincipalship despite its potential representational costs? We apply exploratory analysis to focus-group data to examine how voters reason about intraparty authority and show that participants accepted their role as coprincipals not for self-empowerment, but for parties’ organizational integrity: they viewed party members as effective constraints on self-serving leaders. Based on these findings, we formulate an intraparty constraint hypothesis stating that voters favor intraparty democracy as a constraint mechanism rather than a participatory venue, which provides a theoretical answer to the unsolved puzzle of why voters want intraparty democracy when they do not intend to use it or reward parties for having it.