Candidate selection: elite-member power relations four decades after the ‘secret garden’

The process of selecting candidates to contest elections has evolved in all major Irish political parties since the late 1980s. Many of the older political parties in the system embraced internal party democratic reforms, often seeing changes that would empower members in decisions on candidate and leader selection as providing opportunities to engage and enthuse existing members and, indeed, attract new members. Recent entrants to the party system also tended to favour clear roles for party members in selecting election candidates. But the narrative of democratisation sits uneasily with party constitution clauses that allow party elites, usually known as ‘headquarters’, to add and deselect candidates. Perhaps more importantly, the narrative of democratisation also obscures the defining role that party elites retain in devising the ‘constituency directive’, which essentially determines the number of candidates to be chosen, any geographic or gender criteria to be applied, and when the candidate selection decision is to be made. This article will unpack the tensions between member empowerment and elite control in the increasingly regulated party landscape before finally concluding that party elite control over candidate selection is stronger in 2025 than it was in 1988, when the seminal study by Gallagher [1988b. Ireland: the increasing role of the centre. In Candidate selection in comparative perspective: The secret garden of politics (pp. 119–144). SAGE] was first published.