Selecting Women, Electing Women: Political Representation and Candidate Selection in Latin America

4. The Paradox of Primaries: Inclusive-Decentralized Selection

4 The Paradox of Primaries Inclusive-Decentralized Selection Because we’ve had so many [primary] elections, we haven’t had time to get any work done. —pri municipal party president (interview, May 26, 2003) P olitical primaries have been adopted en masse in recent years (see Field and siavelis 2008 for examples from across the globe and alcántara sáez 2002 for information about latin america) in response to the consensus that primaries are a means of increasing “openness and internal party democracy, and therefore normatively preferable to traditional, less inclusive methods of candidate selection” (Carey and polga-Hecimovich 2004: 1).1 inclusive selection is seen as preferable because democratization results from “widening participation in the process, i.e., when the selectorate that is adopted following a reform of the candidate selection method is more inclusive than the previous one” (rahat and Hazan 2001: 309). There is also an “implicit assumption that selection made at the local level is more democratic , as the decision is decentralized to those who will be represented by the candidate, and that the more persons eligible to participate in the selection process the better” (Cross 2008: 598).2 in other words, the belief is that if more people participate in decision making, then the process is more democratic. scholars have noted that “success in a primary might also validate the democratic credentials of a candidate that would likely have been awarded his party’s nomination under any procedure” (Carey and polgaHecimovich 2006: 534). it is perhaps not surprising, then, that parties in argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa rica, the dominican republic, el salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, nicaragua, panama, paraguay, Uruguay, and venezuela have all experimented with primaries, since, “For many analysts, primary elections are the only reform available to parties if The paradox of primaries 57 they really want to democratize” (lara rivera 2006: 16, as cited in Baldez 2007: 70).3 Theorists may wish to debate just how democratic primaries are relative to other forms of candidate selection, but it is important to recognize that we cannot be certain about how democratic so-called primaries really are in practice. This chapter presumes that the electoral contests convoked by parties are in fact true primaries, while Chapter 5 discusses some candidate -selection methods that were cloaked as primaries but did not function as such.4 The most common explanation for the switch to primaries is that parties wish to appeal to voters by increasing voter involvement and decreasing the fraud often found in convention systems (Hopkin 2001; Ware 2002).5 primaries can be a means of invigorating a party that is facing electoral difficulties by giving it a new democratic face (Katz and Mair 1995; Hopkin 2001), which is particularly important in latin america because of declining citizen support. primaries can also alter the internal balance of power within a party and can be a powerful means of introducing change to a political party (Hopkin 2001). scholars have also argued that parties find primaries attractive because these are likely to produce more electable candidates (serra 2011).6 Work on argentina demonstrates that incumbents’ ability to run for reelection and the status of the party nationally explain the use of primaries for selecting congressional candidates (de luca, Jones, and Tula 2002). poiré presents a different story based on the Mexican case: party leaders will open up candidate selection in an effort to keep strong potential candidates in the party and, in this way, improve the party’s chances of winning election (poiré 2002). poiré argues that strong aspirants will defect if passed over for candidacies; because primaries allow them to compete for the nomination, they are less likely to take their talents to other parties. similarly, Bruhn argues that party leaders are forced into using primaries “to resolve conflicts of ambition” (2010: 43). as Galderisi and ezra explain: While enhancing the attractiveness of a major-party nomination, a democratic primary system also removed a major justification for partisan infidelity. losses would henceforth be democratically decided defeats; nominations could no longer be viewed as the machinations of backroom politicians, at least not visibly. vanquished opponents, subsequently, could not as easily justify a decision to embark on an independent or minor-party run for office as they once could. (2001: 14–15) 58 Chapter 4 in a similar vein, others have argued that political elites may want primaries —even if they do not expect their...