Gatekeeping by Central and Local Party Actors: Theory and Evidence from a Field Study of New Brunswick Nominations, 2017-2018
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Gatekeeping by Central and Local Party Actors: Theory and Evidence from a Field Study of New Brunswick Nominations, 2017-2018 Quinn M. Albaugh∗ January 27, 2021 Abstract Under what circumstances do central and local party actors engage in gatekeeping to influence the outcomes of local nomination races? In this paper, I develop a theory of gatekeeping in Canadian parties. I present evidence for this theory with a field study of New Brunswick provincial nominations (2017-2018), including participant-observation of 25 nominating conventions; 93 interviews with party insiders, nomination candidates, and other individuals with knowledge of the nominations process; and an original dataset of nominations for the 2018 New Brunswick election. The theory and results call into question the conventional wisdom that riding associations are the decisive actors in selecting local candidates in Canadian political parties. The extent of central party gatekeeping suggests a need to re-evaluate Carty's claims about a \stratarchical bargain" within Canadian political parties and, ultimately, challenges the notion that Canadian party nominations are minimally democratic. ∗University of Toronto and Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Please direct correspon- dence to [email protected]. I gratefully acknowledge support from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Award, along with grants from the Princeton Canadian Studies and the Mamdouha S. Bobst Centre for Peace and Justice. I would like to thank Chris Achen, Jeyhun Alizade, Elizabeth Baisley, Paul Frymer, Dara Strolovitch, and seminar participants at Princeton University for comments on previous versions of this research. 1 Since the first large-scale studies of candidate selection in Canada in the early 1990s, the guid- ing assumption of scholarship on candidate selection in Canadian political parties is that riding associations select candidates (Carty, 1991; Carty and Erickson, 1991; Erickson and Carty, 1991). This assumption underpins arguments that diversifying riding association executives should im- prove the representation of women and racialized minority groups (Cheng and Tavits, 2011; Cross and Pruysers, 2019; Medeiros, Forest, and Erl, 2019; Tolley, 2019; Tremblay and Pelletier, 2001). At the same time, scholars have documented several formal and informal means through which central party organizations { party leaders, their staff, and formal party organizations { increased power over candidate selection, including refusing to sign candidates' nomination papers (Court- ney, 1978, 2015; Erickson and Carty, 1991), formal appointment powers for party leaders (Koop and Bittner, 2011), vetting or \green-light" processes that allow party committees to keep candi- dates off the ballot (Pruysers et al., 2017), and manipulating the rules or logistics of nominating conventions (Pruysers et al., 2017). However, we still know relatively little about why central and local party actors engage in gatekeeping { exerting influence over the choice of candidate during candidate selection to favour or disfavour particular candidates { over candidate selec- tion in particular nomination races in particular ridings. Gatekeeping is critical to understanding which actors have influence over the nominations process, why Canadian parties nominate the candidates they do, and, ultimately, which individuals actually hold elected office. In this article, I argue that central party organizations exert much more influence over local candidate nominations than past work has acknowledged. They typically do so through informal gatekeeping practices, such as controlling the logistics of nominating conventions, rather than through formal powers of appointments and the leader's veto. However, they are less effective in exerting control over nominations when riding associations are strong, particularly in relatively safe seats with retiring incumbents. I support this argument with a multi-method field study of candidate nominations in New Brunswick's political parties across all ridings in advance of the 2018 provincial election. A field study allows for the gathering of in-depth qualitative evidence on particular nomination races. This type of qualitative evidence is rare in scholarship on candidate selection, since it is costly to obtain. However, it is invaluable for identifying mechanisms and ensuring that particular cases are correctly coded (George and Bennett, 2005). Although a study of federal nominations would speak most directly to past work on candidate selection in Canada, it is not generally feasible to gather in-depth data across a large number of ridings given their geographic size. For this reason, field studies of riding-level politics in Canada, such as Scarrow (1964), Sayers (1999), Koop (2011), Koop, Bastedo, and Blidook (2018), tend to rely on a small number of ridings. New Brunswick is small enough to allow for the collection of qualitative and quantitative data across all ridings. New Brunswick serves as a microcosm of party politics in Canada. New Brunswick is the only province whose party system has traditionally shared similar linguistic and religious pressures as the federal party system. Its provincial and federal parties tend to overlap substantially in terms of personnel (Koop, 2011). As a result, while these findings draw on provincial nominations, they 2 do so in the province most likely to generalize to federal politics and most able to speak to past work on candidate selection at the federal level. I review the conventional wisdom that local party organizations control candidate selection in Canada, along with increasing evidence that central party organizations have more power than previously ackonwledged. I outline a theory of gatekeekping by central and local party actors that explains many past findings on candidate selection. I sketch out a series of observable implications of this theory, for which guide the evidence presented in the paper. I lay out the research design, materials, and data collected. I present a series of qualitative and quantitative evidence that supports the theory. First, I present interview and participant-observation evidence that there is a \norm of interference" that limits the power. Second, I recount interview and participant- observation evidence that party actors nonetheless have \preferred candidates" that they support through the nominations process despite the norm of non-interference. Third, I demonstrate with interview evidnece that party actors have a range of different activities, which form a \gatekeeping repertoire," through which they can influence the nominations process. Fourth, I use quantitative data on uncontested and contested nominations to show that, in line with the theory, contested nominations overwhelmingly emerge in competitive and safe non-incumbent ridings, particularly those in which central and local party actors have recruited different nomination candidates. Finally, I show that gatekeeping helps explain when disagreement between central and local actors over the choice of candidate does not lead to a contested nomination using a close study of \near-contested" nominations { cases in which multiple candidates expressed an interest in running at the same time but the party acclaimed one candidate at the nominating convention. This paper makes three main contributions. First, it brings new evidence to bear on de- bates over the influence of central and local party actors, including elite interviews, participant- observation and quantitative data across all ridings. This combination of materials suggest that central party actors, including party leaders' offices and formal party organizations, are often able to influence the selection of local candidates behind the scenes to shape the overall candidate slate. This observation stands in stark contrast with the implicit assumption in past work that riding-level variables alone explain the nomination of women and members of racialized minority groups (Cheng and Tavits, 2011; Cross and Pruysers, 2019; Medeiros, Forest, and Erl, 2019; Tolley, 2019; Tremblay and Pelletier, 2001). Second, it suggests a need to re-evaluate the extent to Carty's \franchise bargain" (Carty, 2002, 2004) and the concept of intra-party democracy (Cross and Katz, 2013; Cross et al., 2016) actually hold within contemporary Canadian parties. Although party actors often recognize the power of norms that bar party actors from \interfering" in candidate nominations and that support the right of local party members to choose candidates, party actors often circumvent these norms to exert influence over the candidate nominations pro- cess. As a result, the evidence for gatekeeping casts doubt on the ideas that riding associations autonomously choose candidates or that Canadian political parties are fully internally democratic. Third, the theory has testable implications for future work in federal and provincial politics, along with work on candidate selection in comparable countries such as the United Kingdom. 3 Who Controls Nominations in Canada? On paper, Canadian political parties have traditionally used the most open candidate selection processes outside of American primary elections (Cross et al., 2016; Hazan and Rahat, 2010). In most federal and provincial political parties, the formal rules governing who is eligible to vote are even more permissive than general elections, save for membership dues. Individuals ages 14-17 and permanent residents are able to join political