Not meant to debate whys and wherefores. I’m just curious if there are other countries where voters register their party affiliation with the government, as I understand is the case in some (but not all) states in the US.
I’m not aware of any. OTOH, in most countries, parties are organised incorporated organisations that you can join (just like any other association or society), in which case you pay a membership fee and get a member’s card. In most countries, party membership is in decline; there was a time when, among working-class people, it was rather common in any countries to have a union membership plus one in the local socialist or social democrat party. Those days are over. But there are still many people who have a party membership which is openly known (I used to have one myself), and in such cases it’s easy to guess who they’re going to vote for.
In the UK, it’s not that most people mind whether other people know of their opinions or formal membership of a party (though certain professions, like police officers and civil servants, have rules about how politically active/visible they may be, and extremist parties are forbidden to them). It’s just that the public election authorities aren’t involved in running parties’ internal elections.
If there are any, I’d guess that they’re in Latin America. There are definitely countries there that have state-run primary elections, but I don’t know if any of them go so far as to have closed primaries.
The ones that come to mind are more like the communist party in some countries, or Iraq’s Baathist party - being a party member was important for career advancement for educated people looking for jobs related to the public sector. Not supporting the dear leader’s party was seen as a deliberate choice with accompanying results.
(When the US conquered Iraq, they banned Baath party members from working for the new government. As a result, most of the educated Sunni who had been the core of the civil service and justice system, and police, were out of a job, although a lot were members only because they had to be. This did not make things smooth for getting the new government up to speed. )
In places like Canada (and I assume other Commonwealth countries) membership is a small fraction of the population. A riding will have a party meeting to nominate and elect the candidates for the next election. In hotly contested ridings (i.e. where there is no incumbent to have an obvious advantage, or if the candidate would be the party favoured to win) the meeting may be “large” which usually means over 1,000 attend. The lead-up to such a meeting will often feature one group or another trying to sell memberships to anyone in the riding they can before the cut-off date, so the person is eligible to vote. Accusation that the candidate’s campaign is paying for those memberships is not uncommon (but not allowed). the few meetings I’ve been at, the attendance was more often in the 100 or so category - but the candidate perennially lost in the election. Sometimes, the local party brass have to go looking for a suitable candidate and persuade them to run. But to answer the OP - it’s not a matter of public record who is a party member.
Here’s an old example - they’re talking about “hundreds of new members” making the difference.
This is the case, as I understand it, too. It has to do with primary elections, which are about choosing which candidates from a particular party will go on to run in the general election.
The link below shows the various types of primary election rules:
- Some states have a “closed” primary, in which only previously-registered members of a political party can vote in the primary (and only for their party’s slate)
- Most states have some level of openness to their primaries, allowing “unaffiliated” voters to vote in the primary, or allowing voters to declare a party affiliation at the voting location
- Some states have fully “open” primaries, allowing anyone to vote in a primary without having to declare a party affiliation
Note that this only holds for primaries; in general elections (those held in early November), there is no restriction on needing to be a party member to vote.
This is the important part. In a general election, nobody asks what party you belong to. Everybody gets the same ballot and is treated identically.
That the state government also bears the expense for primary elections may be unusual to those with parliamentary systems, but it spares the parties the huge expense of statewide elections. That’s a great convenience, especially for smaller parties, although it means they have to make the ballot in the first place, which is not automatic and can be difficult. All states allow voter registration without party identification.
Non-affiliation may limit your ability to vote in a primary, although some states now allow same-day registration, but it also gets you off mailing lists.
Some political ads make use of previous or switched party registration, but I can’t think of any acts of official governmental retaliation for party registration in the modern era.
This WIkipedia page mentions other countries with primary elections but it doesn’t make clear whether the state runs the voting process.
Just to note: recently moved from a state where there is no party registration at all to one where it exists and is purely optional. If the former and in the latter if you haven’t registered a party you get to vote in the primary of your choice.
Yes, we don’t have province-wide elections. Plus, as @MD-2000 points out, voting in nomination contests is restricted to party members.
When a party holds a province wide or country wide election - i.e. who’s the party leader who is going to be the prime minister/premier if the party wins? They used to have a big convention, sometimes still do. Each riding holds some meeting similar to a nomination meeting to send their delegates; elect, say, 10 delegates to the party meeting. usually youth groups, university groups, etc. also get to send delegates.(Parties also hold smaller conventions that are less important every year or two…) If you want to be a delegate- some local parties can afford to pay their delegates’ way, others - if you want to be a delegate, you need to be able to afford to go. IIRC the time I went to a leadership convention, there were just under 3,000 voting delegates. It’s not unlike the conventions for Dems and GOP every 4 years, except delegates are free to vote (by secret ballot) for the candidate of their choice. Each round of voting, lowest drops off, until someone gets 50% or more. When one of the major parties - Liberal, Conservative (whatever they call themselves today) or New Democrat - hold a contest for a new leader, it’s a newsworthy event.
Lately, to avoid the expense and make things more democratic, parties have been moving toward one member one vote mail-in ballots. Buy a party membership, you will get a ballot to mail in. To simplify the elimination process, it’s usually a ranked ballot - who’s your first, second, third etc. choice?
But again, the membership list is privately held, not public. You could theoretically buy memberships in multiple parties, but IIRC most party bylaws say you can lose your membership if you join a competing party. If they find out - usually that would be because someone in the other party snitches. Politics is fun, especially small town politics. (Usually memberships are paid for a year, so you have to renew each year - last time I bothered, about $10.)
Very rarely does party politics matter in municipal elections, other than “birds of like-minded feather flock together.”
In the UK, AFAIK, all the major parties use for their leadership elections some variant of (1) nomination/weeding out of candidates by the party’s MPs and (2) postal balloting on the final shortlist by paid-up party members .
Candidates for MP are usually selected by the members of each party’s constituency association from a shortlist drawn up by the constituency association’s executive committee (sometimes with the “advice” of someone from the party’s national or regional HQ, if it’s seen as a key seat for the party) - and applicants have to be on the party’s “approved” list (having been checked over by the national party to see if they’re reasonably articulate, presentable and ideologically in tune with the party’s principles, and no skeletons in the cupboard, not that those are always spotted).
And yes, we have our occasional spats over “entryism” by someone’s cronies or by extremists, or HQ parachuting a favoured candidate into a safe constituency (or twisting a sitting MP’s arm to accept a peerage so as to create a vacancy for a favourite).
The difference is in Canada, any member can run for the nomination. Members of parliament or provincial legislatures have no say. Candidates have to get a list of X signed members supporting their nomination (typically between 20 and 100) then all candidates are voted on at the constituency meeting… again, usually successive ballots where the worst performer drops off until someone gets 50%.
The party brass have to sign off on the candidate for arty affiliation to appear on the ballot. There have been occasional instances where a candidate say (or once upon a time said, or did) something inappropriate enough to get their party endorsement declined or revoked… but sometimes too late the party has already printed the ballots. Usually to get the approval, the candidate must fill out a form vetting their suitability. Using nasty tricks to block a candidate who is otherwise suitable (i.e. factional disputes) will reflect poorly on the campaign of whoever does get the party nomination.
The main party office sometimes parachutes favourite prominent candidates into a riding, but the risk is that it annoys the party brass. jean Chretien was notable for twisting arms to prevent disenchanted ridings from allowing an open contest where his cronies might get replaced as the party candidate. (Tricks like limiting the nomination period to less than a day) Local party executives defy the head office at their peril. Pierre Trudeau notably promoted his buddy to the appointed Senate (upper house) to make room for his friend and main advisor Jim Coutts to run in the Spadina riding byelection in downtown Toronto back in the day; he lost a safe Liberal seat to the NDP who held it from then on.
Similarly, party leader is open to all members, no MP approval needed - the nomination papers required are more complex (i.e. need a more diverse list of sponsors) and the fees are hefty. There was a leadership contest (Conservatives?) back in the 80’s, and one candidate was a totally inept total unknown. People wondered why he bothered to run, until they realized - when it happened - that he had in effect bought for $5,000 a half hour of speech time on all the major networks since they were covering the convention live. He rambled (droned) on about his pet socio-economic peeves. After that convention, the fee was raised to around $100,000. (I believe some is refundable if the candidate gets some substantial portion of the first-ballot votes.)