Some countries have taken special initiatives when aspects of the internal party candidate selection processes for parliamentary or municipal elections have proved controversial.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, political reformers complained that powerful party organizers ('party bosses') exercised almost complete control over the selection of candidates. The party bosses frequently used this control for corrupt purposes. If candidates selected by the party bosses gained election, especially to senior offices in city governments, they become beholden to the bosses; the bosses would then require the office-holders whom they effectively controlled to make decisions that enriched the bosses by corrupt means (for instance, by the unmerited award of municipal contracts). For the reformers, a key to eliminating this corruption was to break the power of the party bosses over the candidate nomination process. The special initiatives they sponsored (which included the introduction of primary elections to nominate candidates) aimed to control corruption.
Most other special initiatives concerning the selection of candidates have had the aim of ensuring the nomination of members of under-represented groups. In the United States, there have been special efforts to ensure that blacks have been able to participate in the processes by which parties have chosen their candidates; there have also been attempts to ensure that larger numbers of blacks have succeeded in gaining nominations. Canada, too, has attempted to address the question of the under-representation of members of 'visible minorities and Aboriginal peoples' 'pcc06#1'.
A method recommended here was the drawing of constituency boundaries to take account of demographic factors and thereby to produce ethnically distinct constituencies likely to adopt as candidates members of the predominant local minority group.
In Britain, efforts within the Conservative Party after the Second World War concentrated on the problem of the severe under-representation among its members of Parliament of politicians from working-class backgrounds.
More recently, some of the strongest campaigns in a number of countries have been to achieve a larger representation of women in the legislature.
Legal Initiatives versus Internal Party Measures
Special initiatives have sometimes involved non-legal campaigns within political parties. For instance, a rule introduced after the Second World War within the British Conservative Party imposed a strict limit on the amount of money a candidate was permitted to donate to his local constituency association. The rule was intended to remove the financial demands that resulted in the selection of rich, middle-class, and upper-class candidates, and which made it difficult for working-class Conservatives to secure nomination. (Though the rule affected the methods by which constituency parties financed themselves, it did not result in the selection of working-class candidates. It turned out that money was not the only barrier; social prejudices among local Conservative Party activists also seemed to lead to the virtual non-selection of working-class Conservatives as candidates for winnable parliamentary constituencies.)
By contrast, many of the reforms concerning nominations of candidates within parties in the United States have involved legislation, by state governments, as well as legal rulings by the Supreme Court. The internal affairs of political parties in the U.S. have been subject to legal regulation to an extent unknown in Britain until the present. The introduction of the system of candidate nomination by party supporters through primary elections was a notable U.S. innovation of the early twentieth century.
Quotas
Some reformers advocate an introduction of quotas to guarantee a better representation of members of disadvantaged social groups. Quotas may be introduced either through legislation, or through internal, non-legal party rules. For instance, some parties have set quotas for the percentage of women among their legislators.
The issue of quotas has given rise to spirited discussion. A review of the issue of quotas for women candidates appeared in the Final Report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing (The Lortie Commission) 'pcc06#1'.
International experience shows that the most powerful tools for increasing the representation of women would involve mandatory measures including quotas.
The Commission fought shy of recommending the imposition of quotas on party organizations, although it advocated financial incentives to encourage parties to select a quota of women as candidates:
We recommend that should the overall percentage of women in the House of Commons be below 20 percent following either of the next two elections, then: (1) at the two elections following the next election, the reimbursement of each registered party with at least 20 per cent female Members of Parliament (MPs) be increased by an amount equivalent to the percentage of its women MPs up to a maximum of 150 percent; (2) this measure be automatically eliminated once the overall percentage of women in the House of Commons has attained 40 per cent
(Volume 1, p. 273.)
A policy of quotas for blacks, women, and youth was the main plank of the reforms of nomination procedures in the Democratic Party of the U.S. recommended after the party's disastrous and violent presidential nominating convention in Chicago in 1968. The policy was part of a set of recommendations by the Fraser-MacGovern Committee designed to reduce the influence of party bosses such as Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago. The rules followed complaints about the entrenched racialist attitudes among members of local party elites (bosses of local party 'machines').
Quotas have been opposed on grounds of both theory and practice. The objection of grounds of liberal theories has been that the selection of candidates should be based on a consideration of individual merits, not on a potential candidate's race, sex, or age. Thus talk of the over-representation' or 'under-representation' of a given group demonstrates - according to this view - a misunderstanding of the nature of representation. Quotas, it is argued, submit to the racialist argument that race should be a key factor in candidate selection.
Practical arguments against quotas are that:
- they create resentment, thereby increasing rather than decreasing racial prejudices
- they sometimes lead to the ablest candidates' being passed over because they do not come from the correct group, and
- quotas are incompatible with local autonomy over candidate selection. This last point needs to be considered further.
The idea of a quota is to produce a desired social mix at a national level. Where there is a system of single-member constituencies, it is obviously impossible to have a mix at the local level: for each local party organization, the choice is either to select a male or a female. It will therefore be open to a local organization to argue
we have selected a male for our constituency, but we favour the fair representation of females in other constituencies.
Reformers argue that the problem is that local party organizations all too frequently say this, with the result that they almost all favour fair representation (say of women) in theory, but rarely in practice.
The only practical way to deal with this problem is for the central party organization to lessen the authority of the local committees. For instance, a device intended to guarantee more female candidates in winnable constituencies within the British Labour Party has been for the national organization to dictate to certain local Labour organizations that they must choose from a short list of applicants, all of whom must be women. For better or for worse, special initiatives relating to the selection of candidates will normally entail the centralization of internal party structures.
Quotas and Proportional Representation (PR)
If constituencies each elect a number of members, as under systems of proportional representation, then it arguably becomes easier to impose a policy of quotas. For instance, a constituency party which selects a list of four candidates for four seats will be able to select two men and two women. The issue of fair gender representation is reportedly an issue of particular relevance to the application of PR systems in what are considered to be male-dominated societies in Africa. In Namibia, the Local Authority Act stipulates that five out of fifteen candidates for local authority elections conducted under the PR system, must be women. However, proportional representation alone does not guarantee the election of a high percentage of women to the legislature. The Lortie Commission reviewed the matter:
The most stringent measures and the highest proportion of women among elected representatives are found in the Scandinavian countries. Many have attributed [this] to their electoral system, which is based on proportional representation. International comparisons reveal, however, that the relationship is more complex than this.
Although some countries with proportional representation systems, including Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, have a higher proportion of women representatives, others, including Italy, Belgium, and Spain, have a smaller percentage of women representatives than countries with a plurality system.
(Volume 1, p. 111.)
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