Popular Candidates and/or Party Soldiers? The Interactive Effect of Candidates’ Vote-Earning Capacity and the Candidate-Party Congruence at the 2014 Belgium Elections

Political parties need to act as unitary actors in parliaments to implement their policy goals. The literature has acknowledged that candidate selection process is one of the most powerful tools for a party to achieve and maintain internal cohesion within the parliamentary group. Political parties that do not win election cannot develop their policy goals though. Candidate selection processes present thus two – potentially conflicting – objectives: vote-seeking strategy (recruiting ‘popular candidates’) and policy-seeking strategy (enlisting ‘party soldiers’). The personalization of politics, where electoral campaigns are increasingly personal while eroding the role of issues and ideology in voting behaviour, enhances the tensions between parties’ vote-seeking and policy-seeking strategies. According to some scholars, the former even prevails over the other which causes critical consequences for the functioning of parties in legislature and the broader democratic political systems. However, in line with more recent development in the literature, we argue that personalization is not necessarily a zero-sum game: political parties can balance tickets using both strategies. In that configuration, one strategy interacts with the other, rather than prevail over the other. Using an innovative and consistent measurement of candidate-party congruence, we test this interaction on the recruitment of candidates at the 2014 Belgian elections. Overall, our results prove that vote-seeking strategy matters but heavily depends on policy-seeking strategy. It demonstrates that parties use both strategies as a trade-off to balance their lists, even though vote-seeking strategy ultimately prevails for a substantial number of candidates studied. The results call for a more positive normative account of the personalization thesis. The later has the potential to keep voters, candidates and parties connected in the representation process.