Selecting the Right Type of Personnel

Abstract

Party membership seems to lose importance for political careers. In the wake of political dealignment and dwindling numbers in party membership, an increasing number of parties have started to recruit candidates without prior party membership. What are the implications of this trend in elite recruitment for candidate loyalty, party unity and legislators' activity in parliament? This thesis empirically addresses these questions by making use of several novel and self-collected quantitative data-sets. First, the thesis explores the formal eligibility criteria within parties that aspirants for candidacies have to fulfill. By using data based on roughly 500 self-collected (historical) party constitutions, data on parties' parliamentary voting records and candidate survey data, this thesis finds that candidacy eligibility criteria that presume a minimum length of prior party membership are associated with greater party unity and candidate loyalty. Secondly, I explore how prior party membership affects to behavior of legislators. Expectations generated from social identity theory are put to empirical tests using data on all Member of Parliament of the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2013, and their voting behavior on unwhipped votes. Longer spells of prior and active party membership are associated with greater coherence, theorized to be the product of socialization processes into parties' norms and values. Finally, the consequences of long-term party membership respective the lack thereof are investigated by taking advantage of the Japanese case. I explore the behavioral differences of candidates nominated through open recruitment and those nominated through traditional channels, as has been practiced by major Japanese parties. I _nd that those candidates nominated under open recruitment, oftentimes lacking prior party membership and political experience, are ill-prepared for legislative office at the national level. Compared to their more traditional colleagues, these candidates are less active in parliament. In conclusion, this thesis finds that party membership matters on such dimensions as party unity and legislative activity, and that it is (enforced) intra-party socialization processes that help prepare the individual candidate for the responsibilities of legislative office. Thus, this thesis contributes to the literature of candidate selection – by looking at eligibility criteria – and legislative studies – by assessing the former's consequentiality.