Political parties's choices of who leads them can have a major bearing on politics. Recent research shows that selection procedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties in broadly comparable European parliamentary democracies. The most common analytical approach is to focus on the ‘official story’–that is, what the parties’ statutes say that they do when selecting a leader. This, in turn, implies a heavy emphasis on the final stage of the selection procedure, in which the decision about who will lead the party is made by the ‘selectorate’. Yet this, the ‘official story’, is only a part of the process, and quite often not even the most important part. In this article, we seek to make the classification of selection processes more manageable and meaningful. We propose a typology of the ‘mode’ of selection, in which the emphasis is on the management of competition for the leader's position before the decision reaches the selectorate. We identify five modes of competition: open, enclosed, filtered, enclosed and filtered, and managed.

Unlike political parties in many other countries, Swedish ones have not adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. While the party congress formally selects important party offices, the process is managed, prior to the formal vote, by a selection committee vested with the task of filtering the pool of potential leaders and proposing one of them as the new leader. In this article, we survey the composition of these selection committees over time to investigate the extent to which change has taken place. Specifically, we investigate whether the composition of these powerful committees, which decide who joins the ranks of the country's political leaders, has developed over time in relation to what prominent theories of intra-party power might lead us to expect. We derive testable expectations from prominent conceptualisations of intra-party power and apply these empirically. Specifically, we study the composition of party selection committees in Sweden over 50 years, 1969-2019. In total, this includes 40 different selection committees and almost 400 individuals. Contrary to conventional wisdom on intra-party power relations, the empirical analysis reveals a surprising degree of stability, raising questions about common claims of general power shifts within parties.

Political parties shape politics, and the most important person in a party is usually the leader. Party leaders make the political weather. Take a recent example from Britain. In 2015 the Labour Party, somewhat unexpectedly, lost a national election. Its leader resigned and a new one was needed. “Jeremy Corbyn is not going to win the Labour leadership election”, insisted one of the country’s shrewdest political commentators (Rentoul 2015). But Corbyn did win, and by a comfortable margin. Labour thus took a big stride to the left.

In this book, we examine the varying ways in which political parties manage intra-party conflict, or potential conflict, when they make what might be their most important decisions – on the selection of their leaders. We take special account of actors that, formally and informally, filter the field of aspirants even before the decision reaches the selectorate. Our analytical framework is developed both deductively, with a foundation in delegation models, and inductively, through reference to case studies from nine European countries. We present a typology of selection processes, which illuminates intra-party power structures.

In modern democracy, party leaders are key actors. Not only do they hold the highest offices of their organisations; they are also figureheads externally. Party leaders take centre stage in elections, parliamentary debates and in government formation. They are constantly present in the media; political news is simply incomplete without them.

The international trend towards more inclusive leader selection (Cross and Blais in Party Politics 18: 127–150, 2012) seems to have gone largely unnoticed by Swedish parties. At least on the surface, the process works as it has done for decades. Almost exclusively to Sweden, it centres on a valberedning, a selection committee. This committee is typically chosen by the formal selectorate of the party, the party congress. The job of the valberedning is to consider candidates and then to propose one of them as the new leader.