The effect of Party Nationalization on Candidate Selection Process
The object of this paper is to examine the effect of party nationalization (PN) over the candidate selection process. As nationalized political parties seek to build a good reputation, what is the best option to achieve that goal: a strong control over the candidate selection process or a more democratic candidate selection process? Most of the literature has assumed that party nationalization increases the centralization of mechanisms to select candidates in the party (Bizzarro et al., 2018). We test this assumption here. We argue that the greater the level of nationalization in a party, the greater effort to build a reputation. Political parties more nationalized are equally known across all the districts and long-lasting. Thus, to maintain the electoral support, they should have good reputation (Simmons & Hicken, 2011; and Bizzarro et al., 2018). Through centralized mechanisms to select candidates, political parties could control the national reputation. The paper uses data from the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) and political party database project (PPD) and uses cross-section analysis for 25 countries and 140 parties in 2011. We found that controlling for country characteristics more nationalization leads to more centralization on the selection. The study adds to the understanding of how PN affects political outcomes (for example, see Simmons & Hicken (2011), Castañeda-Angarita (2013), Maggini & Emanuele (2015) and Morgenstern (2017)), by expanding this research to include the candidate selection process.