This is a post in my constitutional design series. For logistical reasons I decided to repurpose an old unrelated post instead of creating a new one, so ignore this post’s published date and url.
This is the second part of my post on party candidate selection. The first part was about the “who” of party candidate selection: who makes up the selectorate that chooses the candidates. This next part is about the “how”: how you translate the selectorate’s preferences into candidate choices. I’m going to make my posts on electoral systems for a single leader and a legislature required reading for this part; I’ll reference them a lot. I’m going to refer to those as the “inter-party” electoral systems to differentiate from the intra-party electoral systems discussed here (for example, used in primaries).
Two Philosophies for Legislature Candidate Selection
There are two overarching philosophies for party legislative candidate selection in light of the coordination problem discussed in part 1. The first is having winner-take-all candidate selection and relying heavily on the coordination problem for party unity. The second is saying to hell with the coordination problem and having more proportional candidate selection, instead relying on explicit mechanisms to limit the selectorate to just party supporters.
Most parties in most countries opt for more of the former approach. There are plenty of exceptions though: the Irish parties in the 1980s, Italy’s PD and France’s Socialists all have proportional intra-party candidate selection, among others. I think the proportional approach is better. When you have winner-take-all candidate selection for a party’s legislative candidate, you have no guarantee that the largest bloc in a party won’t dominate and get control of all the candidates. It is very common to see a popular party leader gain extreme control of the party’s candidate selection, leading to a party that acts mostly as a rubber stamp on the leader. Why even bother having the party made up of legislators in that case, just give the party leader some number of votes and be done with it (a system called PMR I described in my post on legislature electoral systems).
Proportional candidate selection allows you to explicitly control the degree of uniformity and the relative power of different actors by changing what fraction of the selectorate comes from which source. Let’s go into depth of what exactly that entails.
Mechanisms and Recommendations
Leader
The selectorate for a party leader can be pretty much whatever you want out of what’s mentioned in the first part, there are a wide variety of options I think are defensible. (The one thing I wouldn’t do is give power to the current party leader, as in general hand-picked successors are bad and can lead to dictatorship). Regardless of the selectorate you choose, there are two parts to candidate selection for a single leader: narrowing the field down to a few people, and then deciding among them. You can even have different selectorates for the two parts, like have the narrowing down done by legislators and the choosing by the public, or vice versa.
I’m going to assume that the selectorate is a group of people who should each have equal power, whether this be the broader public, legislators, or whoever else you want to include.1 . Going off this assumption, the first round should use first-past-the-post and have the top eg 4 candidates from one round, or all candidates that get above eg 10% of the vote, make it to the next round. (Or maybe a combination of the two, where you need to be both top 4 and get above 10% of the vote; see for example this system).
The hope is that once you’re down to a few people, the voting system you use for the second part won’t matter that much. Things should be a lot less factional at the party level than in a general election, so the plurality winner, the Condorcet winner, the utilitarian winner, etc. should hopefully be the same person.
Unfortunately, sometimes things are quite factional. Sometimes, for example, there is one really polarizing figure that emerges as a frontrunner - Trump 2016, for example - and the public splits for and against them. In these cases, I don’t think it’s clear what you should do; I could see a case for many of the single-member systems I talked about in my electoral systems post.
Legislature
I think you should make a party’s legislature candidates chosen proportionally by a candidate committee. This committee’s composition is then where the choice lies: you can have some fraction chosen by party members, some chosen by the party leader, some chosen by national politicians, etc. This allows you to robustly control the leverage of different groups and the amount of ideological diversity by changing the fraction chosen by each selectorate. If you want to induce more party uniformity, for example, you can let the party leader appoint more members of the committee. Without explicit proportionality built-in, you tend to have one faction of the party dominate in ways that are hard to control.
For some inter-party electoral systems, you could give each group control not over some fraction of the candidate committee but over some fraction of the selected candidates directly. More on why this doesn’t work for all electoral systems in a bit.
By The Public
I would have candidate committee members chosen by a direct multi-member electoral system like single transferable vote (STV) or proportional approval vote (PAV). Exact proportionality is less important at the party level because the stakes of who gets a majority are lower, so I wouldn’t mind going down to 3 members per district if using STV or PAV to help with public knowledge. Alternatively, if you want more granularity, you can have the public elect a body of 100+ delegates in districts, and then have these delegates meet at a convention to select candidate committee members (proportionally). In that case I really like my proportional multi-vote representatives (PMR) with districts of 10ish member votes for this.
If you do go with delegates, I do worry that they aren’t going to be super representative of the public because people don’t know who these candidates are. There aren’t as many “issues” for delegates to run on because they don’t do as much. I am hopeful though that voters will be able to assess things like whether a delegate is a “party insider” or “leader’s pet” or “random businessman”, which should be indicative of important factional disputes.
The same probably holds to a lesser extent even if you have committee members elected directly by the public, not entirely sure though.
By Legislators
How you let legislators elect members of the committee is pretty flexible.
You could have them select members by STV or PAV in 1 big election. Alternatively, you could split the legislators up into groups and then have each group elect committee members by STV or PAV. Those groups could be geographic regions if legislators are elected in districts, or if legislators are elected in a party list you could cut up the list somehow (eg spots 1,6,and 11 are group A, spots 2,7,and 12 are group B,etc.). Or another thing you could do is just let the legislators manually sort themselves into groups and have each group unanimously agree on delegates proportional to how big it is.
Legislative Candidate Selection
Regardless of which inter-party electoral system you use, you want to generate a sort of “ranking” of legislative candidates: which candidates will be seated if a party gets 20% of the vote, which will be seated if it gets 40% of the vote, and which will be seated if it gets 60% of the vote. For closed list proportional representation (PR), this is literally the party list. For Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) or other non-proportional single-member-district systems (which you should never adopt), this is which candidates are in safe districts, which are in swing districts, and which are in long shot districts. For multi-member districts like Single Transferable Vote (STV), this ranking is handled by the voters themselves, by which candidates get more of the vote.
I’m ok with giving the leader’s committee members all the top spots on that ranking. (if you do that, maybe I’d reduce the number of commitee members the leader gets). But for the rest of them, I think they should be selected by the candidate committee proportionally.
More precisely, what we want is not just that the overall ranking will be proportional, but that every contiguous sublist will be proportional. That way, no matter how many seats a party gets, the candidates will be selected proportionally to the committee members.
With closed-list PR, where you can precisely control who gets which spot, the easy way of doing this is letting each committee members select an equal number of candidates, and then interlace the candidate spots evenly. So if you have 30 committee members and a 60 candidate list, member 1 can get spots 1 and 31, member 2 can get spots 2 and 32, …; these member numbers would be some ranking of the committee members2. Once a committee member gets a spot in the ranking, they get to control which candidate is chosen for that spot. They might consult with other committee members, or with local party branches, but they are ultimately in charge of choosing that spot.
For inter-party mixed member proportional (MMP) or district-level closed-list PR, you essentially replicate this by letting member 1 choose any district (and get the top spot on that district’s list, for district level PR) first, then member 2 gets to choose any district (and get the top remaining spot on that district’s list), then member 3, etc. People should choose the seats that are the safest first, and potentially seats close geographically to them.3
For inter-party multi-member systems like STV, you run into an issue. Since the voters themselves pick who the top spot on their “ranking” is, it’s likely that (if a district elects fewer candidates than the party nominates) the biggest faction of a party takes all the top spots. The only way around this is letting each committee member choose *all* the candidates in their assigned district, which defeats some of the point of multi-member systems. Maybe you’re ok with sacrificing intra-party proportionality in these systems, but I’m not, which is why I generally dislike these systems.
State Intervention
The final question is how many of these details the state should mandate.
If you have a proportional system with no/low thresholds, I’m ok with keeping things a bit looser. But if you have high thresholds or plurality bonuses, I’m in favor of mandating a lot. In that case I think you should mandate at least:
That candidates are selected by one or more committees
That these committees are composed at least 70% of members elected by a party’s current legislators and/or the public.
That these committees choose candidates proportionally, satisfying the contiguous sublist proportionality I described, except at max 15% of candidates.
That the members selected by legislators are selected proportionally.
That publicly elected members are selected by a proportional system
That this “public” includes people in any geography (ie not a single convention, or if you have local party meetings you need them throughout the country).
I’m ok with mandating a lot more though - the proportional system you use, the exact percentages, etc.
I think if you don’t mandate, there are going to be different pressures that push candidate selection in different directions - elites will want to have more elite say, the public is going to want more public say, the largest faction will want a less proportional system and the smaller factions will want more - and there’s no guarantee you’ll get a good system out of it. This is also why I don’t think we should read too much into the current party candidate selection methods as a signifier of learned wisdom: A party’s candidate selection system is mostly a consequence of whichever groups tended to be empowered to determine the system.
New Parties
New parties are where mandates like these get tricky.
You want mandates that prevent a party leader from totally dominating their party. The issue is that a popular party leader can always start a new party if they feel like the mandates are making their party’s candidates too disloyal. Then, they can appoint loyal elites, and will likely have a loyal base that follows them to their new party as party members. This is especially a problem if a leader has been around for a long time, giving them a better idea of which elites are loyal to them and which are not.
The most direct way of addressing this loophole is capping the number of seats that a new party can win. This is like a threshold but with a max rather than a min; as with min thresholds you should use ranked voting to make sure votes above the cap aren’t wasted. This forces a party to grow over time rather than immediately get a majority. In practice, this shouldn’t matter that much: growing over time is what a new party does most of the time anyway, it’s rare for a party to immediately get a majority.
(There are some more technical details to work out to fully close the loophole through this mechanism; read this footnote4 for more.)
Besides this direct mechanism, I think to some extent you just have to rely on the public and elites not being endlessly loyal to a new party leader. I think the public should usually be less loyal to the leader of a new party than the elites, since the elites are chosen by the leader themselves, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. As long as there is some minority of the party (whether in the public or among chosen elites) that shows real independence, that can be enough to add important diversity.
If you want different people to have different power, you can weight their votes a different amount. So for example, you might give local politicians 0.1 vote each while national legislators get 1, or you might give the legislators as a whole 50% of the votes while the public gets the other 50%. For practical reasons I don’t think this works too well - this was basically Democrats’ superdelegates system, and these delegates ended up voting for whoever the public voted for because it would look really bad otherwise.
Or you can do something fancier and do a snake draft.
If you want delegates to take the seats closest to them geographically, you can have this process take place in multiple regional candidate committees. Unfortunately, unless you have big regions - probably regions that are expected to elect 5 candidates *from that party* - you aren’t going to get a level of proportionality I think is acceptable. The only time I think this is potentially feasible is if you have a two-party inter-party system. (This is the only time I’d consider MMP anyway, so maybe then you could do it).
Instead of running as a new party, a popular party leader can create a number of different separate parties, appointing loyal servants as heads of the other ones. The simplest way of doing this would be to have regional parties, and then either run these parties in different places (if using geographic districts) or just encourage voters in different regions to pick their respective regional parties and then rank the other regional parties next.
To get around this, you can set a fairly high min threshold for new parties as well to create a very narrow range for a party to aim for, so that a leader has to split their supporters very evenly to get a significant chunk of the vote, which would be very difficult. A min threshold of 10% and max of 15%, for example, or maybe even a min/max both of 15% to simplify things. If all voters of the new party rank an established party second, there should be no wasted votes. Then you can disallow ranked voting from pushing a new party above the min threshold (ie don’t allow votes to be redistributed to a new party that hasn’t made the threshold based on first-place votes) in order to stop the two regional parties from simply ranking each other second and using ranked voting to distribute the votes evenly between them.
If you’re using a really high threshold or a two-party electoral system, this doesn’t exactly work of course because 15% means no seats at all. In that case you should just not allow a party to get any seats at all if they got less than 15% of the first-round vote last election.