Susan E. Scarrow, "Parties and the Expansion of Direct Democracy: Who Benefits?" Party Politics, 5 (July 1999), 341-362.

First Paragraph:

In an overview of changing party organizations in western democracies Peter Mair (1994: 15) observes a trend towards the 'enhanced democratization' of parties which finds them 'empowering rather than marginalizing' their members by giving them 'more say rather than less say'. This development has spilled into some of the most important sites of internal parry decision-making so that'more and more now seem willing to allow the ordinary members a voice in the selection of party leaders'. This development challenges us to reconsider old notions of internal party democracy and the role members play in such critical internal party decisions-making as the selection of a new leader.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: Membership participation in internal party decision-making
Table 1: Four every-member vote leadership selection cases
Table 2: Party membership in every-member vote contests
Table 3: Membership growth and leadership vote participation

Last Paragraph:
The next stage in research on every-member votes might well be to begin to map variations within each of the distinctive types in order to discover what leads particular parties to adopt particular systems and with what consequence. Clearly these developments put the patterns of leader--party relationships in western democracies in flux. They in turn open a series of important questions central to issues of party democracy. After all, it is one thing to use every-member votes to choose new leaders but perhaps another to use them to remove leaders who have overstayed their welcome. Will the membership now have regular opportunities to review the leadership? Will the processes for selecting and removing leaders be symmetrical? If not, how will the parties deal with the inevitable conflicts that arise when there are different constituencies in the party responsible for those two tasks? Until the parties find acceptable answers to these questions they are going to be especially vulnerable to internal conflict. Members who are invited to vote for a leader may soon demand to vote on a good number of other things as well.