The Evolving Process of Party Leader Selection in the Baltic States : Institutions, Dynamics, and Intra-party Democracy

It contains the detailed record of party leader elections until 2015.While studies on party organization in the Baltic countries have examined candidate selection, 3 party memberships, 4 and party structures, 5 only a few have focused on party leader selection, long-term data, and the process of diachronic change.In several cases, the political parties in the Baltic States have failed to systematically disclose the results of party leader elections, including information regarding whether the elections were competitive and, if so, how many votes went to each candidate.This study reconstructs such data from available records (particularly news agency materials) and analyzes their longterm fluctuations.Furthermore, it analyzes these evolutions in the context of the institutions of each Baltic country by examining a comprehensive set of press materials.Among the same Baltic countries, the strategies for electing the party leaders of major parties vary, with three variants.Lithuania often uses internal party elections, Latvia rarely uses internal party elections and the party leader is almost always nominated, and Estonia follows a combination of the two systems.Although individual case studies and media reports exist for the systematic cause-and-effect of these differences, no long-term analyses exist.This is partly because past party leader selection data is scattered and unaccumulated.This paper fills this gap by systematically accumulating historical party leader selection data and discussing the changes in the actual situation concerning institutional differences between countries.In the following sections, this study summarizes the characteristics of party politics in Baltic countries and their institutional and social backgrounds.Furthermore, it reviews the party leadership election records of the main parties in the three countries and describes associated political phenomena.Moreover, it examines Lithuania, where party primaries are adopted, Estonia, where competitive elections are occasionally observed, albeit not party primaries, and Latvia, where they are rarely observed; in that sequence.It concludes by reviewing the overall situation and presenting the scope of future research regarding party leader selection and intra-party democracy in the Baltic States and Central and Eastern Europe.