Participation within political parties: Determinants of candidate selection in the 2013 Bundestag election

Transcription

1 Participation within political parties: Determinants of candidate selection in the 2013 Bundestag election Markus Baumann (University of Mannheim & MZES), Marc Debus (University of Mannheim & MZES) and Tristan Klingelhöfer (The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland/USA) Abstract While there are a number of studies that focus on the impact of different types of party organisation on participation and representation within parties, there are surprisingly few studies that concentrate on the impact of intra-party conflict and to be more precise on the legislative behaviour, ideological positions and constituency characteristics of individual Members of Parliament (MP) on candidate selection. Can we observe that MPs who deviated from the party line in terms of the speeches they delivered in parliament have a lower chance to be re-nominated by their party? Frequent deviations of an incumbent MP do not constitute support for the party leadership and may thus encourage the party elite to punish the deviating representatives in a top-down manner. In addition, not addressing the problems existing in the respective electoral district might increase the chances that an MP faces intraparty challengers. Indeed, if an MP does not represent her constituency, she may trigger a bottom-up process in which local activists feel encouraged to challenge their MP in the renomination contest. To explore these processes, we make use of novel datasets that cover not only information on all Bundestag MPs that have run for re-election, but also on their intraparty competitors in the electoral districts in the 2013 election campaign. By combining this information with characteristics of the respective constituency and with the specific programmatic position an MP adopted in her parliamentary speeches in the legislative period from 2009 until 2013, we test whether she was re-nominated or not because of the (missing) congruence between her positions and the constituencies interests. Secondly, we test whether the (failed) re-nomination of an MP on the party list is related to the degree of deviation from the overall party line. 1

2 1 Introduction Political parties are usually regarded as a sine qua non for democracy. One reason for this characterization is that they not only serve as the linkage between the political system and the citizens (e.g., Dalton et al. 2011) but also provide citizens with central opportunities for political participation. Whereas every citizen is able to support a party at the ballot box, some of the participatory opportunities that parties offer are usually reserved for their members. Indeed, party membership is a prerequisite for citizens to run as electoral candidates in many countries. What determines the candidate selection of political parties? While there are a number of studies that focus on the impact of different types of party organisation on participation and representation within parties, there are surprisingly few studies that concentrate on the impact of intra-party conflict and to be more precise on the legislative behaviour and ideological positions of individual Members of Parliament (MP) on candidate selection and its competitiveness. For instance, can we observe that MPs who deviated from the party line in terms of their speeches given in parliament have a lower chance to be re-nominated? This may be the result of a top-down process wherein the party leadership wants a deviant MP out of parliament and mobilises party activists to nominate competing candidates. In addition, not addressing the problems existing in the respective electoral district might increase the chances that an MP faces intra-party challenges. Indeed, if an MP does not represent her constituency, she may trigger a bottom-up process in which local activists feel encouraged to challenge their MP in the re-nomination contest. To explore these processes, we make use of novel datasets that covers not only information on all Bundestag MPs that have run for re-election, but also on their intra-party competitors in the electoral districts and their positions on the party list in the 2013 election campaign. Focusing on the elections to the German Bundestag allows us to make use of the different types of mandates list mandates and district mandates that exist due to the German mixed electoral systems. District candidates are usually nominated by representatives of the local party organisation, whereas the party list is put together by higher levels of the party hierarchy. This provides us with an ideal possibility to evaluate our expectations with the top down and bottom up perspective: while the degree of deviation from the party line should 2

3 be less important in the candidate nomination process at the district level, it should be of higher relevance for the position of a current MP on the party list. By combining the information on list positions and intra-party contenders in constituencies with characteristics of the respective constituency and with the specific programmatic position an MP adopted in her parliamentary speeches in the legislative period from 2009 until 2013, we can test whether she was re-nominated or not because of the (missing) congruence between her positions and her party s positions or due to developments in her constituency. Secondly, we can test whether the re-nomination of an MP on the party list is related to the degree of deviation from the overall party line. To answer our research questions, we discuss the possibilities of participation within political parties in the following section. The third section provides a review of the literature on candidate selection within parties and the role of the party membership and electorate. On that basis, we formulate our expectations regarding the impact of the degree of deviation from the party line and the degree of economic problem pressure in an electoral district an MP represents on her chances to face intra-party competition in her district (i.e. at least one opponent in the nomination process in her local party) or to receive a good place on the party list. Section four gives an overview of the data and the statistical techniques used in the empirical analysis. Section five presents the results in a descriptive and analytical manner. The conclusion summarises the findings and discusses their implications for further studies. 2 Participation and Political Parties At first sight, political parties seem to be the classical venue for political participation. The act of voting for a party or a partisan candidate in elections is considered one of the most basic participatory opportunities citizens have in a democracy. Indeed, it is easy to see that voting satisfies van Deth s (2014, ) minimalist definition of political participation; it is voluntary behavior by citizens that is located in the political sphere. It is this function of structuring the electoral process (Schmitter 2001, 72-73) and, consequently, facilitating the parliamentary game and government formation process (Laver and Shepsle 1999; Müller 2000; Strøm 2000; Strøm et al. 2008) that makes parties a sine qua non for modern (representative) democracy. 3

4 The question of whether there are more ways in which parties are linked to the concept of political participation touches upon the very definition of the political party itself. In the conception of parties as mass organizations, a party is thought to consist of the most active and engaged citizens of the social class the party represents (Katz 2014, 185). In contrast, in the Downsian conception, a party is primarily considered to be a team of men who seek office solely in order to enjoy the income, prestige, and power that go with running the governing apparatus (Downs 1957, 137). The members of a party are here described as the organized cheerleader (Katz 2014, 185) of this team: The Downsian party is characterized by its tendency to employ a large share of professionals for its activities. According to van Deth s (2014, ) conceptual map, such professional behavior should not count as political participation because this would stretch the range of relevant behavior to cover conceptually and functionally very different phenomena. To the extent that a given political party is not either a mass or a Downsian party but a specific mix of both, the professionalism criterion excludes the behavior of office holders which is related to their office and campaigning behavior in exchange for money from counting as political participation. For our case of candidate selection, this suggests that the act of offering oneself as a candidate in intra-party candidate selection processes counts as political participation. Where these intra-party selection processes are decided democratically, i.e. by input of the members or of the voters in primaries, casting a vote in such selection elections similarly counts as political participation. However, one might question whether this holds for incumbents to the same degree as it does for non-incumbents. As incumbents have already had a taste of the spoils of office and can reasonably assume having a better chance to become re-(s)elected, their decision to re-offer themselves as candidates is likely to be driven by a different logic than when party members who have either never won the party s candidacy or won it but did not win the election, offer themselves. Van Deth (2014, ) includes a motivational criterion that distinguishes activities aimed at political goals from activities that are aimed at non-political goals in his conceptual map. He does so to allow for non-political activities to count as political participation when they are politically motivated. For the sake of consistency, this criterion is then reapplied to the activities that satisfy the minimalist definition of political participation and those activities that are targeted at the political sphere or problems of the community. We would just like to add here that the literature on party politics has developed a vocabulary relating to the 4

5 motivations of partisan actors: They are presumed to be either office-, policy- or vote-seeking or a specific combination of the three (Strøm 1990; Müller and Strøm 1999). Equipped with this vocabulary, one might argue that motivation may be even more important in the case of political parties than the conceptual map indicates. Acts carried out by professional partisans (e.g. office incumbents) could count as political participation just like those of amateur partisans given that their mix of office-, policy- or vote-seeking motivation is the same. This is premised on the contention that behavior is made equivalent not only by its consequences (cf. Hooghe 2014, 340) but chiefly by its origins. To make an example in our context, offering oneself as a candidate could be counted as political participation no matter whether it is done by an incumbent or not as long as both types of actors do it because they ultimately want to change policy. Of course, however, it is almost impossible to actually identify (or verify) the specific mixture of office-, policy- or vote-seeking behavior of partisan actors (cf. Hooghe 2014, 339). Our point here is mainly that the amateurish/professional criterion in van Deth s (2014) conceptual map essentially works, applied to our case, as an efficient short cut, as it is highly likely that the motivation for activity differs between amateurs and professionals (see above). Indeed, it is constantly presumed in the party politics literature that rank-and-file members are more ideological, or policy-motivated, actors than the party leadership or the party voters (May 1973). In the following section, we refer to theories of legislative behaviour and MPs strategies to get re-nominated for the next parliamentary election. On that basis, we formulate the expectations that are tested in the empirical section of the paper. 3 Theory and hypotheses From the perspective of the model of responsiveness, MPs defend the interests of their electorate and try to transform them into political results (Powell 2004; cf. Ezrow et al. 2011). The latter should increase the chances of being re-elected at the next election. Although the electorate may still be identified as the ultimate principal in the delegation chain of governance (cf. Müller and Strøm 2000), modern political systems are highly structured by parties. While the electorate at large delegates to the parties by voting, the voters can only choose from among those candidates offered to them by the parties (Rahat 2009, 68). It is usually the parties and their members that nominate the candidates for a parliamentary election and thereby decide whether depending on the structure of the electoral system the candidate gets a promising place on the list or becomes a direct candidate in a constituency. Therefore, not only the voters and their preferences are decisive for the actions of an MP but 5

6 also the expectations of the party; in the sense that the leadership of the party is another principal for elected representatives. The existence of several principals having different preferences (Carey 2007) results in differing incentives for the MPs which constitute the agents in this case. To develop our hypotheses, we make use not only of the competing principals framework but forward by Carey (2007), but also of two further perspectives that are often used in the analyses of the behavior of political actors such as parties and their representatives, particularly in multi-level systems. This is, first, the top-down perspective, in which the party leadership or party elite sets the political agenda within the party. A strong intra-party hierarchy with a dominant party elite can from this perspective impact not only the coalition preferences of their sub-national units, so that governments formed on the regional or local level increase not necessarily the utility of the local or regional party, but rather the utility of the national party (e.g., Downs 1998; Bäck et al. 2013: 385). Moreover, the literature that refers to the top-down perspective also emphasizes the impact of the preferences of the party leadership on the legislative behavior of MPs. Depending on the structuring of the electoral system and the contextual factors in the constituencies which influence the representatives accordingly, the dominant principal for the single MP should vary, leading to different legislative actions along these lines. Yet, a too high intensity of intra-party programmatic conflict would jeopardize the success of the three goals of party political actors (vote, office and policy seeking) because an incongruent appearance should irritate the voters, deter them from casting their ballot for the respective party (cf. Alvarez 1997; Snyder and Ting 2002) and could significantly weaken the position of the party leaders, which tends to undermine the influence of a party as collective actor in government formation processes (cf. Luebbert 1986; Bäck 2003). Sjöblom (1968; cf. Maor 1995) therefore proposed besides vote-, office- and policy-seeking considering a fourth motivation of political parties: the realization of a high degree of programmatic consistency (see also Debus and Bäck 2014; Klingelhöfer 2014). Such an assumption stems from the point of view that disunity within a party is electorally harmful (see Greene and Haber 2013) and that the party leadership in order to maximize the chances of winning votes in the next election sets incentives for MPs to stick to the party line. If they follow the party line, e.g. by initiating law proposals, by parliamentary votes or when giving speeches in parliament, so that party discipline is high and visible for the electorate, the party leadership will support the loyal MPs in their personal campaign for re-election (see Kam 2009). If MPs deviate from the party line, MPs should 6

7 receive less or even no support from the party leadership. Moreover, the party elite should be interested in replacing those MPs that are less loyal to the party and its overall programmatic goals in the latter case. We therefore expect that: H1: The more an MP deviates from the party line, the more likely it is that she faces intraparty competition in the process of re-nomination. Deviating from the party line is particularly problematic for government parties. Since the government depends on the backing of a majority in the legislature in parliamentary democracies, a high degree of intra-party policy conflict decreases not only votes (and parliamentary seats), but also the control over key governmental offices, which are required for the implementation of the policy goals of a political party. Relatedly, members of the party elite, which are often represented in the cabinet once their party wins control over the government, would lose prestigious governmental offices if a party is voted out of the government. By following the top down -perspective, in which the party leadership can reward loyal and punish deviating MPs, we expect that, especially in government parties, the party leadership pays close attention to the behavior of their MPs and pushes intra-party rivals during the candidate selection and nomination process, so that deviating MPs face a higher risk to encounter internal opponents. H2: The relationship between an MP s deviation from the party line and intra-party competition in the process of re-nomination is stronger for MPs from the government camp compared to MPs from the opposition camp. We already mentioned that the type of the electoral system sets different incentives for MPs strategies and legislative behaviour (e.g. Sieberer 2010; Proksch and Slapin 2012; Debus and Bäck 2014). When MPs publicly deviate from the party line, the party leadership will have more leeway in punishing intra-party rebels by opposing their reselection as party candidates if the electoral system provides more power to the national party elite instead of attaching more weight to the party organization on the electoral district level. Generally speaking and following Rahat and Hazan (2001), the candidate selection procedure is more centralized in electoral systems with (closed) party lists, whereas the selection of candidates is much more decentralized and less controlled by the national party organization in electoral systems characterized by majority rule in single-member districts (see also Hix 2002 and 7

8 Sieberer 2006 for the effects of candidate selection mechanisms on legislative unity). We therefore expect the following relationships to hold in the empirical analysis: H3: The party leadership will be less successful in preventing the re-nomination of deviating MPs on the constituency level compared to preventing the re-nomination of MPs on a party list. Studies on party competition and legislative behaviour that stress the effects of federal structures of a political system often emphasize the incentives for the representatives of subnational units in parties and parliaments to take regional contextual factors into account while acting and deciding. In a comparative analysis, Carey (2009; cf. also Thorlakson 2009) finds evidence that the degree of deviation from the party line in parliamentary votes is significantly higher in countries with a federal structure than in strongly centralized political systems and parties. While in electoral systems with closed party lists the wishes of the national party leadership should be important in the candidate selection and re-nomination procedure, one could argue that things work differently in decentralised systems where the party organization at the district level are decisive for the re-nomination of MPs, so that a bottom up -process of candidate nomination comes into play. In a comparative analysis including six West European countries Shugart, Valdini and Suominen (2005) found that MPs in proportional representation systems emphasize their affinity for the constituency if the electoral system allows the modification of a given candidate list and the smaller the number of seats per constituency is (cf. also Tavits 2010). MPs can use their legislative activity to send out signals to their electoral district and the voters and party members there, so that they realise that the respective MP cares about the district, which should increase the chances that the MP again wins the nomination process for the next parliamentary election. From this perspective, deviating from the overall party line is unproblematic instead, it is more important that an MP addresses the local problems even if this implies a deviation from the programmatic position of the party and its leadership (see Debus and Bäck 2014). In addition and in line with the importance of the regional and local context mentioned above, we argue that the chances that an MP faces an intra-party challenger can depend on regional characteristics like the degree of local economic problem pressure. We know from studies on legislative behaviour of MPs that when aiming at maximizing the chances to get renominated they try to express their opinion in parliamentary debates particularly on those 8

9 issues that correspond to regional problems and therefore the interests of the voters (e.g., Bowler 2010; Debus and Bäck 2014). Christian democratic or conservative MPs representing an urban constituency adopt, for instance, rather progressive positions. Also the economic situation in an electoral district and/or the preferences of voters at the constituency level on specific issues do influence the legislative behaviour of MPs (e.g., Baumann et al. 2013; Debus and Bäck 2014). If the economic situation in an electoral district deteriorates (and the citizens satisfaction with the overall economic situation decreases as a result), incumbent political actors in particular the ones that control or support the government face an increasing risk to lose re-election according to the literature on retrospective voting (Lewis- Beck and Stegmaier 2000). The findings of the economic voting model do not only hold in political systems characterised by single-party governments, but also in countries structured by coalition governments (Lewis-Beck 1986; Debus et al. 2014). We apply the theoretical argument from the economic voting literature and argue that a worse or below average economic development in the respective electoral district sets incentives for party members to challenge incumbent MPs. Our assumption behind this is that the state of the economy naturally varies among districts. Policy-oriented party members might thus feel that their representative in parliament has done a bad job in furthering economic growth in general and/or delivering selective benefits of economic policies to their home district. Officeoriented party members see such dissatisfaction as an opportunity to challenge incumbents. Just like voters who are dissatisfied with the economy aim to replace their officials, party members use the economic situation in their district to evaluate an incumbent s performance. An additional incentive to replace an unsuccessful incumbent comes from the consideration that this might prove beneficial in the actual electoral contest with the candidates of other parties. H4: The worse the economic development in an electoral district is, the higher the chances that an incumbent MP faces intra-party competition in the re-nomination process. To test this set of hypotheses, we study the candidate selection process in Germany before the 2013 Bundestag election. Making use of the different types of parliamentary mandates list mandates and district mandates stemming from the German electoral system we evaluate our theoretical expectations and assess the presence of top-down and bottom-up processes in the re-nomination procedure of the respective electoral tiers. 9

10 4 Data and method The following sections briefly introduce the data and methods upon which our empirical analysis builds. In accordance with the specifics of the German mixed electoral system, we derive separate measures for the processes of re-selecting constituency candidates and the drafting of party lists. Both measures reflect the success of MPs in their aim to be renominated. We first introduce the measures used for the dependent variables, followed by a brief introduction of the explanatory variables relating to each of the two processes. Dependent variables: Intra-party competition in re-selection As has previously been argued, the electoral tier to which an MP belongs strongly influences a parliamentarian s legislative behavior (e.g., Bowler 2010; Bräuninger et al. 2012; Debus and Bäck 2014) as well as campaign strategies (e.g., Zittel and Gschwend 2007). In the two-tiered German electoral system different logics of re-nomination materialize for MPs elected via the nominal tier (i.e. MPs holding a Direktmandat) and those elected via the proportional tier, that is, MPs elected via one of the party s Landeslisten. The re-selection of constituency candidates is decentralized and largely determined by local party elites. To measure the amount of difficulties of re-selection in this tier we draw on a novel data set, which comprises information on all candidates, that is, including incumbent- MP candidates as well as non-incumbent candidates in each of the 299 electoral districts for the 2013 elections to the German Bundestag from the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), Social Democrats (SPD) and the socialist Linke. 1 The data have been coded using information provided by the parties local organizational units in the different constituencies which was available online during the process of re-selection and previous to the general election in In the direct tier re-selection, incumbent MPs generally face a low risk of not being renominated. 2 However, constituencies differ in the number of candidates competing for nomination and incumbent MPs may face intra-party competition by (non-incumbent) 1 Since only candidates from these three parties have realistic chances to win a plurality of votes in an electoral district, we did not collect information on the candidate nomination procedure of the liberal Free Democrats and the Green Party in the 299 electoral districts. 2 In fact, all but one incumbent MP who had not previously refrained from competing for re-nomination were reselected. 10

11 candidates. We code the presence of a non-incumbent candidate as a measure for intra-party competition and use this binary outcome as our dependent variable in the analysis of nominations in the nominal tier. The re-selection process for list-mps is determined on the Länder-level and allocates incumbent MPs and non-incumbent candidates on party lists. The data for the list-nomination process includes all candidates who have been put on one of the party lists. We derive the relative position of an MP on her party s list as a measure and code whether her placement has improved, deteriorated or remained stable. 3 Independent variables: Deviation and constituency characteristics The main independent variable, MPs deviation in their plenary speeches, is based on a data set comprising speeches held in the German Bundestag between 2009 and Legislative speeches provide a great deal of information on partisan ideology and position taking (Proksch and Slapin 2009). As the right to speak in plenary debates is regulated by parliamentary statutes and frequently limited to individual MPs (Kam 2010), positions taken in legislative speeches do not necessarily reflect the full spectrum of ideological positions taken (Procksch and Slapin 2012). Therefore, legislative speech may not be a suitable measure of the heterogeneity in the positions on the party level. For our purpose however, a measure relating MPs in their deviation from their party s line to the deviation of their colleagues suffices. Though speaking rights in parliamentary debates are limited MPs can communicate their specific ideological positions to the regional and local electorate, to the party members and the party elite. In roll call votes, by contrast, a deviation from the party line is too cost-intensive as it could inflict publically visible defeats to their own parliamentary group in the legislative process, so that MPs in parliamentary systems are likely to vote along the party line even if their own position is not congruent with the position of the party (see Carrubba et al. 2008; Hug 2010; Hug and Martin 2012). Holding speeches including the transported programmatic messages is a possibility to make one s own position clear, to become part of the media coverage and to send ideological signals to key actors in the process of decision-making and candidate selection within the party without causing too 3 Information on the party lists was made available by the Bundeswahlleiter. 4 Due to technical restrictions in data availability, the current (preliminary) version of analysis builds on a data set which contains the speeches held in 219 of the 250 sessions. 11

12 much damage for the party and its parliamentary group in the legislative decision-making process. To analyze the speeches, we rely on computer-aided content analysis and employ the Wordscores technique developed by Laver, Benoit and Garry (2003). This approach was originally developed for the analysis of party manifestos, but has also allowed drawing inferences in studies analyzing the content of parliamentary speeches (e.g., Laver and Benoit 2002; Giannetti and Laver 2009). We use all speeches given by an MP during the legislative period from 2009 to 2013 and estimate a single left-right issue dimension. The reference scores needed to position MPs speeches on a left-right dimension are the values of the RiLe scale from the Comparative Manifestos Project s coding for the German Bundestag elections 2009 (Volkens et al. 2013). As reference texts we chose the speeches of the respective parliamentary party group leaders (Fraktionsvorsitzende), thus assuming that these will represent the position championed as the (national) party line. Scaling parliamentarians speeches allows us to position each MP on the left-right scale. To obtain a measure of deviation from the party line, we calculate the absolute differences between an MP s position and her party s position. The remaining dependent variables are specific to the analyses of reselection in the nominal and list tier, respectively. For the re-selection process in the constituencies as hypothesized above we expect other variables than the deviation in speeches to be important and thus include variables capturing what could be called economic problem pressure. This includes the unemployment rate in a constituency in 2012 as well as the change in unemployment between 2008 and As a tier-specific control variable, we also include the differences in the result of the candidate compared to her party s list result in the constituency. In the re-nomination process in the list tier, we expect a stronger influence of the deviation of an MPs positioning on her party s list as mirrored in her speeches. The variables here include a binary variable capturing whether a MP pertains to one of the government coalition s parties and an interaction between government coalition membership and the deviation in speeches. Both analyses also include a set of MP specific controls. These refer to an MP s age, gender, the number of words she has spoken in parliament as an approximation for status and prominence within the parliamentary party group, as well as her seniority in the parliamentary party group, i.e. the time passed since her first election to the Bundestag. 12

13 Methods Our outcome variables are binary and categorical, respectively. With the binary outcome of intra-party-competition or none in the re-selection as a constituency candidate, we employ logistic regression to evaluate our hypotheses on the impact of deviation and economic problem pressure. The outcome variable in the nomination process of the list tier is categorical: MPs may remain in a stable position, improve or deteriorate in their list positioning. With mutually exclusive categorical outcomes, we employ a multinomial logit model in the analysis of list positioning. We present the results of our analysis in the next section. 5 Results Table 1 presents a descriptive summary of our first dependent variable the presence of intraparty competition in re-nominating constituency candidates. As can be seen from Table 1, for incumbent MPs a contested re-nomination procedure is a relatively rare event: Across all parties less than 15 per cent of MPs had to compete against one or more contenders. The level of intra-party competition was highest in the CDU/CSU, yet 82 per cent of the CDU/CSU MPs were re-nominated without an intra-party competitor in their constituency. *** Table 1 about here *** For our second independent variable the positioning of the MPs on party lists Table 2 illustrates how many MPs improved, deteriorated or retained a stable position on their party s list between 2009 and The re-nomination of MPs on the parties lists seems to be a less stable process than the candidate re-selection in constituencies. Less than a quarter of MPs kept a stable position between 2009 and Here, the MPs from the CDU/CSU have the highest share of stable list positioning with about 41 per cent of them not changing their positioning between the two elections. *** Table 2 about here *** 13

14 In sum, the descriptive statistics of our dependent variables suggest that re-nomination in constituencies and on party lists are largely different processes with different levels of stability between elections. To evaluate our theoretical expectations on the causal mechanisms underlying these processes, we estimate in a first step whether the chances that an incumbent MP faces intraparty challengers is influenced by the following: her degree of deviation from the party line measured on the basis of the content of her speeches in the previous legislative period, the degree of economic problem pressure in the electoral district she represents, and by further personal characteristics of the MP like seniority and patterns of party competition within the electoral district. Table 3 below presents the results of a logit model that estimates the effect of the variables described above. The dependent variable provides information on the question whether a Bundestag MP faced an intra-party challenger in her constituency or not. The results reveal that there is no statistically significant effect of the variable that measures the ideological distance of an MP from her party position. There is, thus, no evidence for a top down-process when it comes to the nomination of a party candidate and therefore no evidence in support of our first hypothesis (albeit the direction of the coefficient has the expected positive direction). This finding signals that the potential pressure from the party elite, which should emerge if an MP does not follow the overall party line, does not influence the candidate selection process at the district level. *** Table 3 about here *** There is, by contrast, empirical evidence that the chances of an MP to face an intra-party challenger increases with the degree of economic problem pressure: the higher the unemployment rate in an electoral district, the more likely it is that an MP faces competition from his fellow party colleagues. If the economic situation in a district is rather bad, then chances for intra-party participation in the candidate selection process increase. This corroborates our fourth hypothesis. There is, according to both models, no effect of variables that provide information on the age or gender of the respective MPs: the chances that an incumbent MP has at least one opponent in her electoral district neither depend on her age nor her gender. What also besides the overall economic condition at the end of 2012 matters is the development of the economic context in the electoral district: as Model 2 and Figure 1 shows, the less unemployment decreased in the respective electoral district between the end 14

15 of 2008 and the end of 2012 (i.e. the less positive the economic development in the respective constituency was), the less likely it was that an MP from the opposition camp in our case an MP who represented the Social Democratic Party faced an opponent from the own party during the nomination process in her electoral district. There is no impact on the economic development in case of the Christian Democrats. It seems that an intra-party challenger gets more likely for opposition parties if the economy is doing well and the government can sell this as its success. In this constellation, members of the opposition party seem to use the positive record of the government to challenge incumbent MPs of their own party. *** Figure 1 about here *** Moving on to the analysis of the re-nomination processes in the drafting of party lists, we find that several factors provide an explanation for the change in the position of an incumbent MP on the party list for the 2013 Bundestag election. Table 4 presents the results of a multinomial logistic regression model, which uses a stable position on the list (that is, the position of a MP remained the same when compared to her position on the party list in the 2009 Bundestag election) as the reference outcome. To reiterate, the dependent variable mirrors whether an MP obtained a better, worse or equal position on the party list as compared to her list placement in the previous election. As can be seen from Table 4, MPs who deviated from their parliamentary party groups ideological position in plenary speeches are more likely to belong to the group of MPs obtaining a worse position on their parties list. For a one unit change in deviation, MPs will be more likely to pertain to this group by a factor of 1.07 as compared to having a stable list position. This lends support to our initial expectation, that deviating MPs will face stronger intra-party competition and thus supports Hypothesis 1. Together with the finding from the analysis of the constituency re-nomination process, wherein deviation did not yield a significant influence, this also provides support for our third hypothesis: Deviating from the party line is more harmful in the re-selection process for party lists, that is, the process which is more strongly dominated by the party leadership. *** Table 4 about here *** The model also includes a variable relating to Hypothesis 2, which states that MPs from the government camp will suffer more strongly from deviation. Interacting deviation with a binary variable indicating affiliation to one of the government parties, however yields no 15

16 significant effect. The effect of being a member of the governing parties alone is significant and negative for both a worse position and a better position as an outcome. This means that MPs from government coalition parties are more likely to belong to the group of MPs with a stable outcome. Yet, this does not necessarily imply that government MPs face lower volatility in their list placements, as changes in list length between elections vary by parties. 6 Conclusion The existing literature on candidate selection privileges explanations centring on party organizational features. We complement such approaches here by focusing on intra-party conflict. After reviewing the interrelations between political parties and political participation, this paper developed hypotheses relating to both, a top-down process as well as a bottom-up process of candidate (re-)selection. These hypotheses were consequently tested in the case of the candidate selection prior to the German Bundestag election in Our empirical analysis of novel data sets covering intra-party constituency candidates, party list positions, MP left-right positions estimated from their speeches in parliament and constituency characteristics indicate that MPs face higher levels of intra-party competition in the candidate selection process the stronger they deviate from the party line. However, this holds only for candidate selection in the list tier and not in the nominal tier. In the latter, an under-average economic situation in a constituency leads to higher intra-party competition. This seems to substantiate the impression that candidate selection follows different processes depending on the respective electoral tier: a bottom-up process for the nominal tier and a topdown process for the list tier. These results are of great relevance for our understanding of responsiveness and incentives for political participation not only inside of parties but also in the political system as a whole. The punishment of deviating MPs in the list-tier may be seen as inappropriate when one assumes, like the mass party model and the associated literature on intra-party democracy does, that the party members should be the sole principals of the MPs. In contrast, our finding that economic problems spike intra-party competition in the nominal tier might be more in line with that. For the responsiveness of the whole polity, candidate selection in political parties is important because the voters can more often than not only choose among those candidates offered by the parties (cf. Rahat 2009, 68). 16

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