Democratic Candidate Selection Increases Public Satisfaction With Democracy

Why This Question Matters

Political parties are central mediators between citizens and the state, but scholars rarely investigate how party internal processes shape citizens’ evaluations of democracy. Yael Shomer, Gert-Jan Put, and Einat Gedalya-Lavy ask whether the way parties choose their candidates—how democratic or closed those procedures are—affects voters’ satisfaction with how democracy works in their country.

How the Study Was Conducted

The authors build a new cross-national dataset that codes candidate selection procedures for 130 political parties across 28 country-sessions. They link those party-level measures to public-opinion indicators of satisfaction with democracy and then test whether citizens who support parties with more democratic internal selection are more satisfied with democracy overall.

• Dataset: 130 parties in 28 country-sessions, with systematic coding of candidate selection procedures.
• Approach: Statistical analysis comparing party-level selection characteristics to citizens’ reported satisfaction with democracy, supplemented by country-specific tests.

Close Looks at Israel and Belgium

Shomer, Put, and Gedalya-Lavy complement the cross-national work with focused analyses of Israel and Belgium, two systems where candidate selection procedures vary substantially and where political actors have publicly pushed intraparty democratization. These cases allow the authors to probe whether the cross-national pattern holds in contexts with active debate about party democratization.

What They Find

Both the cross-national analysis and the country-level tests in Israel and Belgium show a consistent relationship: voters who back parties with more democratic candidate-selection procedures report higher satisfaction with democracy. The association appears across different countries and in the two detailed case studies, suggesting that intraparty democracy is linked to citizens’ broader democratic evaluations.

What This Suggests for Parties and Democratic Legitimacy

The findings imply that internal party design matters not only for representation and candidate quality but also for citizens’ subjective assessments of democracy. Parties and reformers aiming to strengthen democratic legitimacy may therefore need to consider how candidate selection rules shape public perceptions of democratic performance.