The effects of the Great Recession on candidate selection in America and Europe

Despite the increasing attention paid to candidate selection in the recent literature, this subject can still be considered “the secret garden of politics” (Gallagher, 1988). There are at least three reasons for this. Firstly, most of the contributions on the field have analysed the formal procedures of candidate selection, forgetting the informal mechanisms behind these regulations (Ranney, 1981; Gallagher and Marsh, 1988; Hopkin, 2001; Katz, 2001; Fujimura, 2012; Cordero and Coller, 2015). As previous empirically-oriented works have shown, there are wide gaps between the internal rules (or even country regulations) and the internal practices that lead party decisions to implement and comply with formal regulations (Cordero et al., 2016). Secondly, a significant portion of the literature has focused on the selection of the candidates to prime minister or leaders of parties, forgetting how the lists for the legislative power are designed (see Sandri et al., 2015). As we know, the composition of parliamentary groups has important consequences on MPs’ behaviour (Carey, 2007; Gallagher and Marsh, 1988; Hix, 2004; Hazan and Rahat, 2007; Cordero and Coller, 2015), the duration of governments (Siavelis & Morgenstern, 2008), relationships with citizens, the internal distribution of power (Katz and Mair, 2005) and, ultimately, the quality of democracy. Thirdly, the Great Recession has intensified the crisis of trust and legitimacy of parties in many countries, in which internal party life might have been put under discussion or implementation in order to reconnect with citizens, focusing especially on the way candidates are selected. The interest of this book lies in the temporal scope of the analysis, as we study how candidate selection has changed in the wake of the Great Recession.