The Slippery Slope of Internal Democracy: Nomination Delegation and Long-Run Leadership Selection

Why do leaders delegate recruitment authority even when doing so can weaken their control, and why do seemingly democratic reforms sometimes produce undemocratic long-run outcomes? We study a party leader’s choice of nomination openness in a two-party model with internal leadership dynamics. Greater openness improves candidate screening and raises expected candidate quality and valence, but it also erodes the leader’s loyalist base and increases the probability that an internal challenge succeeds. Because openness is chosen strategically, the leaders most willing to delegate may expose themselves to higher turnover. This creates a leadership trap, a form of dynamic adverse selection in which reforms that improve selection at the candidate level distort selection at the leadership level. The model yields three implications. First, nomination reforms are strategically linked across parties: symmetry pushes toward complementarity, while they become substitutes when a rival’s reform relaxes electoral pressure. Second, in the ideology application, moderates can be safer under a fixed rule yet turn over faster in equilibrium because they delegate more, which can overrepresent extremists in the long run even without any shift in voter demand. Third, a constitutional planner internalizes current screening gains, turnover costs, and the effect of today’s rules on future leadership composition, so leader-chosen openness can be either too high or too low. Under additional conditions, the same logic extends to competence. Our results offers an institutional explanation of polarization.