Reselection and deselection in the political party

Reselection and deselection are often treated as mechanisms of direct democracy, at odds with any meaningful transfer of decision-making authority to others. This paper argues that the representative and direct dimensions of democracy may be complementary and that recall mechanisms in political parties can be used to reinforce their programmatic basis and to consolidate the reasons people have to associate with parties in the first place. The paper defends a principled use of reselection and deselection mechanisms in political parties, and answers four main criticisms that the view typically attracts: the constituency objection, the responsibility objection, the incentives objection and the efficiency objection.