Digging in the ‘Secret Garden of Politics’: The Institutionalisation and De-institutionalisation of Membership Ballots in the Selection of Finnish Parliamentary Candidates

Abstract

This article is the first expressly to focus on membership ballots as an instrument in the selection of parliamentary candidates in Finland, a polity in which the nomination process is inclusive and decentralised. A Finnish case study is of comparative interest for three main reasons: (i) Finland is one of the few European countries in which candidate selection is regulated by the state; (ii) challenging much of the literature, the combination of democratised selection procedures and an intraparty preference voting system has not incentivised individualistic parliamentary behaviour and reduced legislative party unity; (iii) contrary to the trend towards the democratisation of nominations elsewhere, membership ballots, from being routinised and internalised in the four larger historic parties, have become the exception rather than the rule in Finland today. Accordingly, this paper assesses the changing trajectory of membership ballots and asks what does their de-institutionalisation indicate about the [changing] dynamics of intraparty participatory democracy?.