Who Controls the Party?

Is there like a left-right division? Do our right parties tend to be more hierarchical, conservative parties?

So...

Only to the extent that very far left parties tend to be very decentralized.

So green parties have as part of their program that they're decentralized.

That's a key element of a green party.

So all green parties are decentralized in the sense that they allow something like primaries to exist in the party.

But otherwise, I don't see that to be the case.

So traditional labor parties, for example, tend to be quite hierarchical.

And I think that's because they have inherited systems from unions, which are also quite hierarchical.

And so they're not as decentralized.

So when I say decentralized, I mean that members of the party... that is people who support the party and typically pay a fee to join as a member for a year or two years or the rest of their life, that those people can participate in selecting candidates in a meaningful way.

And so that means that they can vote in something like a primary where there's different choices, there's different alternatives, and they get to select who's going to represent them on the party's ballot in the general election.

In many of the cases that I'm looking at, we have multi-member districts.

So it's not just a single member district like in the US or even in Canada or the UK, but instead there's three or five or in some cases 20-something candidates running in a district.

And so if you have a decentralized party in a case like that, then that means that the members of the party can vote on who those candidates, those multiple candidates will be from their district, as well as the order that they'll appear on a list in a closed list system where the party list dominates.

And that really matters because in list systems, seats are allocated proportionally to the number of or to the share of votes that parties receive.

And then the individuals who make it into the legislature are allocated based on the party's own rule of who they put in order.

So the top person on the list is the first person who goes into office, and then second and third and so on.

And so the parties dominate or dictate who's on that list and that ordering.

And when I say the parties, again, that can be very different.

In a decentralized setting, that means that the party members can control that.

order.

In the opposite case, in a centralized setting, we see that people behind closed doors are controlling that order.

We don't know exactly what the discussion looks like in many cases, but there's usually a small body of party elite who are solely responsible for selecting all of the candidates, either in their district or in the entire country.

Right.