Party Elites’ Preferences in Candidates: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

Political Behavior https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09651-0 ORIGINAL PAPER Party Elites’ Preferences in Candidates: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment Jochen Rehmert1 Accepted: 29 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020 Abstract Party elites selecting candidates are crucial for the composition of parliament. Yet, despite their pivotal position within the party, we know only little about their preferences for potential candidates and how their own backgrounds shape these preferences. This paper presents results from a conjoint experiment carried out with party delegates chosen to select the candidates for five German parties in the run-up to three state elections. Theoretical expectations derived from the principle-agent framework on delegates’ preferences in candidates are evaluated. Analyses show that delegates prefer attributes indicative of quality and socio-demographic similarity in candidates. Additionally, I show that these preferences for candidates differ between inexperienced and experienced delegates, the latter showing a stronger preference for valence attributes in candidates. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of personal attributes of selectors for candidate selection and hold crucial implications for the composition of legislatures and long-term effects on public policy. Keywords Candidate selection · Conjoint experiment · Party elites · Candidates Candidate selection has crucial implications for the composition of parliamentary bodies. In parties that enjoy safe list positions, selection is paramount to election. In such circumstances, candidate selection and intra-party competition for nominations oftentimes supplement for the lack in inter-party competition and, thus, fulfill central democratic functions including holding incumbents accountable (to the party, that is), propelling legislative turnover and increasing descriptive representation. Especially in closed-list systems, in which voters only face “take it or leave it” options, party selectors nominating candidates hold decisive influence on who is entering parliament. They are better capable of removing corrupt incumbents than voters (Asquer et al. 2019), are better positioned to enforce gender parity (e.g., Hazan and * Jochen Rehmert 1 University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Political Behavior Rahat 2010) and can with precision remove undesired candidates, as has happened, for instance, to outgoing German minister of health Andrea Fischer in 2002, when she was denied both of the promising list positions she competed for—presumably for her handling of a food safety scandal—and failed to re-enter parliament. But what are selectors’ preferences in candidates? What kind of candidates do they like to see on party lists? And how do their own backgrounds affect these preferences? Previous studies have more or less equated nomination outcomes with selectors’ preferences for candidates, and the set of observable characteristics candidates espouse may deem reasonable to infer selectors’ preferences (e.g., Gallagher and Marsh 1988). However, cross-cutting influences from various sides, including the party leadership (e.g., Cutts et al. 2008), anticipated voter reactions (Norris and Lovenduski 1995) or local party heads (Cheng and Tavits 2011), and not last the types of candidates coming forward and—in systems employing party-lists—the need for a balanced slate in terms of gender, age or policy expertise usually dictate selectors’ decision-making and thus could mask their true preferences and bias inferences on selectors’ preference drawn from observable candidate characteristics. Obtaining a better understanding of these preferences is not only of topical interest, but can help us to better understand whether current imbalances in nominations in terms of gender or age is due to selectors’ preferences or rather the institutional context of the selection. Understanding these preferences becomes increasingly important in cases when the nomination of candidates becomes paramount to their election to parliament. And as electorally safe nominations are usually the ones most heavily contested (e.g., Brady et al. 2007), the preferences of selectors come to bear even stronger and more consequential in these cases when they can choose among different candidates to award safe nominations, irrespective of the institutional design of the selection. Yet, a large share of the extant literature on candidate selection focuses on the consequences of the institutional design of selectorates than on elites’ preferences. More inclusive selectorates, for instance, appear to be harmful to descriptive representation of women or other minority groups (Hazan and Rahat 2010, p. 114f.). Exclusive ones, in contrast, seem to facilitate the selection of women (e.g., Vandeleene 2014) and the de-selection of incumbent Members of Parliament (MP) (e.g., Put et al. 2015), which poses one of the greatest hurdle in obtaining legislative turnover and descriptive parliamentary representation (see Best and Cotta 2000). This literature has developed and empirically examined theoretical expectations on the link between the institutional design of selection methods and its impact on selection outcomes (e.g., Rahat et al. 2008; Rogowski and Langella 2014; Smith and Tsutsumi 2014). Yet, the preferences and personal backgrounds of the very actors involved in the selection, i.e. the selectors, have been rather overlooked despite their central role in the selection process. To unveil some of the preferences party selectors’ have for candidate characteristics in the context of a closed-list electoral system in which voters cannot vote for specific candidates, and to further overcome the shortcomings of previous attempts to infer these preferences—including social desirability and the lack of counterfactuals—this study is employing a conjoint experiment with party delegates of five 13 Political Behavior German parties in the run-up to three state elections.1 These party delegates were chosen by local party chapters to represent them at party conventions that decide on the composition of the party’s list. Germany makes for an interesting case and allows to elicit selectors’ preferences for different types of candidates more generically than other systems for four reasons. First, selection is carried out by party selectors in contrast to primary voters. Secondly, German parties employ only minimal eligibility criteria in contrast to many other parties in Europe (see Rehmert 2020). Third, the closed-list electoral system minimizes selectors’ concerns for any single candidate’s presumed electability with voters. Selectors in German parties, thus, are less distorted by these otherwise common factors when expressing their preferences for candidates. Finally, it is not uncommon for candidates to compete in a direct matchup for promising list positions, lending credibility to the conjoint setup. The expe (...truncated)