Party leadership selection and party leaders' powers: Empowered grassroots or leader-centric parties?
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...
| Publicado en: | Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 79; no. 2; pp. 243 - 263 |
|---|---|
| Autores principales: | , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
| Publicado: |
Oxford University Press / USA
Apr2026
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=192849858&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 192849858 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00312290 PAF jtl: Parliamentary Affairs issn: 00312290 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Apr2026 vid: 79 iid: 2 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 192849858 10.1093/pa/gsaf020 ppf: 243 ppct: 20 formats: tig: atl: Party leadership selection and party leaders' powers: Empowered grassroots or leader-centric parties? aug: au: Poguntke, Thomas Scarrow, Susan Webb, Paul D affil: Düsseldorf Party Research Institute (PRUF), Heinrich Heine University, D-40225, Duesseldorf, Germany College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-3000, USA Department of Politics, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QE, UK su: Political parties Grassroots movements Political party leadership Inclusive leadership sug: subj: Political parties Grassroots movements Political Organizations Political party leadership Inclusive leadership keyword: copyrightHolder:Hansard Society copyrightYear:2026 inLanguage:en intraparty democracy party leadership party members party organization publisher:Oxford University Press sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsaf020 copyrightHolder:Hansard Society copyrightYear:2026 inLanguage:en intraparty democracy party leadership party members party organization publisher:Oxford University Press sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsaf020 ab: 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. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
|---|