The reality of representation in Europe : the mode of leader selection in political parties

Political parties’s choices of who leads them can have a majorbearing on politics. Recent research shows that selectionprocedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties inbroadly comparable European parliamentary democracies. Themost common analytical approach is to focus on the ‘officialstory’ – that is, what the parties’ statutes say that they do whenselecting a leader. This, in turn, implies a heavy emphasis on thefinal stage of the selection procedure, in which the decisionabout who will lead the party is made by the ‘selectorate’. Yetthis, the ‘official story’, is only a part of the process, and quiteoften not even the most important part. In this article, we seek tomake the classification of selection processes more manageableand meaningful. We propose a typology of the ‘mode’ ofselection, in which the emphasis is on the management ofcompetition for the leader’s position before the decision reachesthe selectorate. We identify five modes of competition: open,enclosed, filtered, enclosed and filtered, and managed.
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