Reining the Party In: The Price of Taking Back Control

Parties may trade local choice for leadership control when recruiting candidates, either to promote loyalists or to diversify candidate pools. We quantify the resource cost of centralization using the British Conservative Party’s 2006 A-list reform, which increased national influence over nominations. A-list parliamentary candidates were less locally embedded than other Conservative candidates. Difference-in-differences estimates show that A-list candidacies raised party (non-personal) campaign spending by roughly 11–21%, with no detectable change in candidates’ personal spending or short-run vote share. The increase occurred for both female and male A-list candidates. By 2015, the party further increased its spending. A simple vote-production model maps these estimates into the cost of offsetting weaker local appeal. For vote–spending elasticities between 0.10 and 0.25, offsetting a one-percentage-point appeal deficit requires roughly 11–30% more party funds. The results quantify a previously implicit price of centralized party control.