Abstract
New parties with a discourse on democratic regeneration and direct democracy have entered the parliaments of consolidated democracies since the onset of the Great Recession. Podemos is the most relevant of these new parties within the recently transformed Spanish Party System. To what extent does Podemos reflect these ideals of direct democracy in its procedures to select electoral candidates? Looking at Podemos’ primary elections for the general elections of December 2015, we find that its candidate selection process deviates from these ideals in different ways. First, although reliance on e-voting allows a high degree of inclusiveness, its combination with rules that incentive block voting lead to very uncompetitive primaries. Second, when compared to candidate selection processes followed by other Spanish parties, Podemos stands out for the high centralization of the process and the irrelevant role played by the regional tier of the party. From the combination of these two dimensions, the result of the party primaries closely resembled, in fact, what could have been expected from a system of direct appointment by the leader.
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Acknowledgment
We are grateful to Podemos Organization Secretariat, especially to Maria Graciano for providing us with all of the information we requested. We also want to thank Podemos MP, Carolina Bescansa, for her support during the writing of this chapter.
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Pérez-Nievas, S., Rama-Caamaño, J., Fernández-Esquer, C. (2018). New Wine in Old Bottles? The Selection of Electoral Candidates in General Elections in Podemos. In: Cordero, G., Coller, X. (eds) Democratizing Candidate Selection. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76550-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76550-1_6
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