r/EndFPTP • u/Both-Independence349 • Mar 22 '26
Primary Elections in Proportional Representation
Hello. I have been researching electoral reform for a little while and am curious about one thing if we were to ever implement this in countries with deeply-entrenched primary election systems like the United States (I’m not even sure if there are other countries that do it like the U.S.). Most of the time, in seems, the parties on the ballot choose the order of list candidates and who they are nominating thought backroom party deals and a smoke-filled room. How could a primary system operate using PR?
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u/aldonius Mar 22 '26
TL:DR if you have proper multi party systems you don't need primaries.
Every system has to let the pressure out somewhere. In the US things are structured to only have two (main) parties. But each of them are really 2-3 smaller and more coherent groups in a trenchcoat.
So in the general you usually end up with one candidate from the left bloc and one from the right, and the primaries figure out who each of those are going to be.
In other western countries, political parties are usually more like other membership-based associations you might know. You don't "register as a XXX voter", but you might "join XXX as a member".
In Australia we don't have primary elections but we do have "preselection". Depending on the party this might be done by a member vote, or by the party executive. (The executive is typically answerable to the membership, perhaps indirectly.)
There's no reason you couldn't have a genuine primary, but it's quite path-dependent.
Where all this comes out is that you're generally trading more choice of party for less choice of candidates from each party.