Revitalising parties from within? The use of primary based selection methods by Australian parties

Abstract

The phenomenon of a fast disappearing membership has challenged modern political parties in advanced democracies for a number of decades. Many parties in Western Europe have responded by democratising candidate selection methods, beginning in the late 1990s. While Australia’s mainstream parties have experienced similar declines in membership, it is only recently that some state divisions have begun to explore the use of more participatory pre-selection methods. This paper examines recent experiments with candidate selection methods by state divisions of three different major parties: the National Party (NSW), the Liberal Party (Victoria) and the Australian Labor Party (Victoria). The paper seeks to account for the reasons that Australia’s mainstream parties have been slower than their counterparts elsewhere to decentralise candidate selection. It argues that compulsory voting in conjunction with fairly robust levels of party identification have reduced the imperative for Australia’s mainstream parties to use candidate selection reform as a strategy to stabilise its voter base.