Part of the Politics and Economics series |
Electoral systems |
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Part of the Politics series |
Party politics |
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Party primaries or primary elections are elections in which a political party selects a candidate for an upcoming general election. Depending on the country and administrative division, there may be an "open primary", in which all voters are eligible to participate, or a "closed primary", in which only members of supporters of a political party can vote. There are also other variants of primary elections worldwide (discussed below). Electoral systems using first-past-the-post voting for both primaries and the general election are sometimes described as using plurality-with-primaries, to highlight the structural and behavioral similarity of such systems to the plurality-with-runoff system (sometimes called a "nonpartisan blanket primary").
When combined with party-list proportional representation, the method is called an open list system; in such systems, primaries are generally combined together with the general election.
The origins of primary elections can be traced to the progressive movement in the United States, which aimed to take the power of candidate nomination from party leaders to the people.[1] However, political parties control the method of nomination of candidates for office in the name of the party. Other methods of selecting candidates include caucuses, internal selection by a party body such as a convention or party congress, direct nomination by the party leader, and nomination meetings.
Parties in countries using the parliamentary system sometimes have an equivalent process: a leadership election in which party members elect the leader. A party's leader will typically become the head of government should that party win a majority of seats in the legislature. Thus, a leadership election is often considered to be one for the party's de facto candidate for prime minister or premier, just like a primary.
Prime ministerial primaries have been held in inter-party electoral alliances, such as the 2021 Hungarian opposition primary, and also in cases where a single party opted to retain its leader but select someone else as its prime ministerial candidate, as the Portuguese Socialist Party did in 2014.
The inverse may also happen: the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan automatically bestows the party's internal leadership on the sitting DPP president.
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