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.