Reviewing the Political Consequences of the Primaries. A Study on the Gubernatorial Elections in Argentina

Abstract

There exists a large debate within the scholarly community regarding the impact of primary elections on general election outcomes. While some scholars conclude that the use of primaries to choose a party’s candidate (compared, for instance, to candidate selection by the party elites) has a positive effect on a party’s performance in the general election, other scholars believe the influence of primary use on general election performance is, in fact, negative. A weakness of this extant literature is it is based almost exclusively on the analysis of elections in theUnited States. This article adds to this literature by examining the electoral consequences of the candidate selection process employed by political parties to select their gubernatorial candidates in the Argentine provinces between 1983 and 2007. We find that whether or not a party selects its gubernatorial candidate via a primary or elite designation does not affect its probability of victory in the general election (with one minor exception).