What’s in a Party Member’s Mind? Voting Motives in Direct Member Votes to Select the Party Leader

The last few decades, numerous political parties have opened up the selection procedure of their party leader to all party members (Cross & Katz, 2013; Pilet & Cross, 2014; Sandri, Seddone & Venturino, 2015). Most research has focused on mapping this evolution (e.g. Pilet & Cross, 2014) and on analysing the processes leading to the introduction of more inclusive procedures to select the party leader (e.g. Lisi, 2010; Wauters, 2014; Gauja, 2017). The actual functioning of (inclusive) leadership selection procedures has been underexposed, however. We would like to tackle this lacuna by discussing how members make their choice in such intraparty contests. Contrary to parliamentary elections which are in almost every country investigated by large-scale national election surveys, the number of surveys investigating motives and voting patterns in intra-party elections is far more limited. In this paper, we analyse the results of a large-scale survey among CD&V party members on the occasion of the 2019 CD&V leadership elections in Belgium, one of the most competitive internal elections ever in this country. We would like to investigate what is in a party member’s mind when making a choice for a particular candidate in a leadership contest. We distinguish between personality traits (such as competence and prior experience), programmatic concerns (policy stances of the candidate), intra-party relations (e.g. attitude towards party members) and subgroup affiliation (such a coming from the same region, or having similar age or sex).