Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Open primaries



The open primary to select the Conservative candidate in Totnes a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/05/totnes-a-new-politics" has occassioned some positive comment /a. There are good things about it - and it has got a lot of the electorate involved. 25% of them voted in the postal ballot.br /br /However, there are issues with it - especially if it was rolled out nationally in every constituency for each party's nomination. One is that it takes power away from party members and activists - who actually do the hard work for the party on the ground - and gives it to people who may not be party supporters. The other issue is, the more people you involve in an election, the harder it is for candidates to communicate with them without using mass media of a sort. This therefore will either encourage candidates to spend more money on winning the contest - and so help those who are personally rich or have rich donors - or it will help those candidates with high existing name recognition they can trade on. It will thus help celebrity candidates.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/38622711-5207375592868221060?l=vinospoliticalblog.blogspot.com'//div

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