Welsh Journals

8. DEVOLUTION, PARTIES AND NEW POLITICS: CANDIDATE SELECTION FOR THE 1999 NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS Jonathan Bradbury, Lynn Bennie, David Denver and James Mitchell INTRODUCTION It has long been recognized that the composition of legislatures is determined as much by the parties who select the candidates as by the electorate who pick the winners. For this reason party candidate-selection procedures are a central concern in political analysis. This is no less true of the Welsh Assembly. In this article we examine how candidate selection was conducted in the major parties for the first elections in May 1999. While each of the parties could draw on their experience of candidate selec- tion for Westminster and European Parliament elections when selecting candi- dates for the Assembly election, devolution raised new expectations and posed new problems. The electoral system itself necessitated a new approach, for it required that two types of candidate be selected for the forty single-member constituencies and for the five four-member regional lists. The parties responded with a uniform pattern. Each drew up a list of approved candidates, before choosing constituency candidates and then regional list candidates. Devolution threw up other pressures, however, which could impact on each of the stages. These arose from the tensions inspired by the more challenging prospectus raised by devolution: the search for a 'new politics'. 'New politics' suggested primarily that devolution was about democratic renewal, placing at least some pressure on Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats, though not the Conservatives, to democratize as well at the devolved level (see Osmond, 1999). In the context of candidate selection this meant pressure to increase openness of candidacy, notably via the introduction of gender-balance procedures; greater membership participation in selection; and central party policing of procedures to ensure fairness. Secondly,