Abstract
Do nomination rules shape how voters evaluate their representatives? Some scholars argue that, in places where trust in political parties is low, primary elections can be an electoral asset by improving how politicians are regarded by voters. Yet, this claim has received little empirical scrutiny. A survey experiment in Mexico, where parties have employed several nomination rules in recent years, allows us to assess this argument. We find that, by and large, providing information about the method by which a politician was nominated to office—relative to not providing such information—has virtually no impact on how voters evaluate the politician. At the same time, we uncover evidence of a relative advantage of primary elections over more centralized nomination rules. Specifically, learning that a politician was nominated in a primary election—relative to learning that they were appointed by party elites—improves voter perceptions of politician quality and increases their reported willingness to vote for the politician in the future. Our results have important implications for political parties in many developing countries and new democracies, where intraparty democracy is increasingly popular.
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Notes
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this valuable insight.
These dimensions need not be aligned. For example, lotteries might be seen as a fair recruitment method, but aspirants selected via lotteries should be of average quality. In contrast, regardless of their perceived fairness, procedures consistent with merit recruitment (e.g., open competition) are expected to select the most qualified aspirants.
We are not aware of any work that provides direct evidence for this mechanism.
This prohibition was established in 1933 and lifted in 2014.
This does not mean sitting presidents have stayed out of their parties’ presidential nominations, e.g., Ascencio (2021) argues President Calderón (2006–2012) influenced the PAN’s presidential primary in favor of his preferred aspirant.
Since 2001, major newspaper Reforma has published 2200 pieces using the word “dedazo” (see Appendix A).
For instance, during a 1994 presidential debate, the PAN’s nominee attacked his rivals by pointing out that his party was the only one that selected its candidates for all offices in democratic conventions (Weldon, 1997).
According to reports of the electoral commission (see CG59/2003, CG76/2006, CG173/2009), the PRI leaders appointed six candidates in 2003 and seven in 2009.
No matches were identified for the PRI. Since there was practically no within-election variation in the rules used by the party, it was impossible to find exact matches on election year.
For example, pairs in which both politicians were lawyers were considered to be more similar than a pair in which one was a lawyer and the other an accountant.
Thus, for each pair, the only difference between Primary-No Information and Appointment-No Information is the politician’s name.
To address any potential issues this may cause, we verify that our main results—described in detail in the next section—are robust to: (1) controlling for the entire battery of covariates (Appendix H), and (2) excluding respondents who said they knew the politician in their vignette (Appendix I).
Overall, we estimate this model on three different subsets. The first only includes respondents in the Primary conditions, that is, Primary-Information and Primary-No Information. Since the appointment information is delivered in two ways (with and without the word Dedazo) we use two different subsets to estimate the effect of the appointment information. One includes respondents in Appointment-Information and Appointment-No Information, and the other those in Appointment-Information Dedazo and Appointment-No Information.
Using ordered logistic regressions produces substantively identical results, as reported in Appendix F.
We conduct several robustness checks (in addition to those described in footnote 13). First, we estimate the model in Eq. (1) but interact Informationi with PRDi (Appendix J). The results show no substantial heterogeneity by whether respondents were presented with a vignette from PAN or PRD politician. Also, we test for heterogeneous effects by whether the respondent supports the party of the politician in their vignette (Appendix K) and by the partisanship of the respondents (Appendix L). As before, we find virtually no evidence of heterogeneous effects.
We clarify that the causal interpretation of \(\delta\) follows from the DiD assumptions and not from randomization.
Appendix N reports models with controls.
As we completed this manuscript, Mexican parties selected their candidates for the 2024 presidential election. Throughout this process, the ruling party (MORENA) and its main rival (Frente Amplio por México) disqualified each others’ nomination methods—calling them, e.g., a dedazo, farce, shady elite agreement—while claiming that their own method was truly democratic/legitimate (see Cruz, 2023; Raziel, 2023).
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Ascencio, S.J., Chang, H.I. Do Primaries Improve Evaluations of Public Officials? Experimental Evidence from Mexico. Polit Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-024-09926-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-024-09926-w