By Lori Turnbull

January 31, 2025

The Liberal Party has announced that close to 400,000 people have signed up as registered Liberals eligible to vote for the party’s next leader. To put this in context, the Liberals say there were roughly 100,000 registered Liberals when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his intent to resign on January 6th. When the Conservatives held their leadership race in 2022, they boasted a whopping 675,000 members, with 613,000 of them signing up in the months just before the leadership vote.

It has never been easier – or cheaper – to join a political party. The Liberals don’t charge a fee at all. The shift from traditional leadership conventions to the one member, one vote model of leadership selection has created a huge incentive for leadership candidates to sign up as many supporters as possible in advance of leadership votes.

Political parties have made this change ostensibly to make leadership selection processes more inclusive and democratic, but the unintended consequences of this shift include more vulnerability to entryism, more power and less accountability for party leaders, and increased transactionalism in the relationship between political parties and voters.

The Liberals and the Conservatives both use a preferential ballot to elect new leaders. Party members rank order their candidates from most to least favourite. It is not a national referendum, however; members’ ballots are counted in the riding in which they live. The winner is decided based on a point system that weights all ridings in the country equally so that candidates have an incentive to pitch their campaigns broadly as opposed to targeting the most populous areas. Parties can decide whether voting will take place in person, electronically, or by mail or phone.

In comparison, the old-school leadership selection model empowered party delegates to select new leaders at conventions. Voting was done in person, and in rounds. If no candidate got a majority on the first ballot, the least popular candidate was dropped off and their voters switched their loyalty to someone else. This continued until someone won a majority of the votes.

There is no question that the delegate model was far less inclusive. The Liberals used the one member, one vote model for the first time in 2013 when Justin Trudeau became party leader. Just over 130,000 members and supporters were eligible to vote (and just over 80,000 of them voted for Trudeau). However, in the leadership convention that selected Jean Chrétien in 1990, a total of 4,668 votes were cast by delegates (2,652 of them were cast for Mr. Chrétien which gave him a win on the first ballot.)

But the delegate model protected a role for those who had made a substantive commitment to the party. For example, in the 2006 Liberal leadership process, many delegates were chosen by riding associations in accordance with which candidates they had pledged to support and, in addition to this, there were 850 ex-officio delegates including current and former MPs and senators, past party presidents, and others. Nowadays, the longtime party stalwart has no more say in the leadership selection process than the guy who registered for free five minutes before the cut-off.

If an entryist seems like they might have enough appeal to win an election, the party could choose to let their candidacy go forward despite tension with party values. Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is a telling example of how this can happen.

The delegated convention model brought with it large incentives for competitive candidates to appeal to less popular candidates and their supporters as the ballot got shorter. After all, the support of the now-orphaned delegates could be enough to push you over the edge for a win. Leadership conventions were robust exercises full of negotiations between various factions of a party. Promises were made that would help bring these factions together around the winning candidate. These exercises kept parties intact and helped them perform their all-important brokerage function.

These days, candidates win by signing up the most members possible. There are no negotiations on the convention floor and very little effort on the part of front-runners to court the supporters of other candidates, which can leave the traditional divisions produced by leadership campaigns festering long after the results are announced.

The criteria for becoming a candidate in a leadership race tend to be minimal: one typically needs to be a party member for a period of time, demonstrate support from other party members in the form of signatures (currently, Liberal leadership candidates needed to produce 300 signatures of support), and pay an entry fee. A steep fee, like the $350,000 in effect in the Liberal leadership race, can have the effect of keeping long-shot candidates out, but not if they have access to a wide financial network.

The one member, one vote model is much more susceptible to entryism (infiltration by foreign governments or non-state interests) than the delegate model was, and a high entry fee is not enough to fix this problem. A person with enough money and supporters could become competitive in a party leadership competition. Of course, parties always have the right to disqualify a candidate who fails to live up to party values; this veto power might be controversial but is essential to ensuring integrity in leadership processes. On the other hand, if an entryist seems like they might have enough appeal to win an election, it could be that the party chooses to let their candidacy go forward despite tension with party values. Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is a telling example of how this can happen.

When leaders win through the one-member, one-vote model, it can be hard to get rid of them even when they’ve hit their best-before date. The Liberals learned this the hard way. They spent months speculating about the timing of Trudeau’s departure, but the party had very little in the way of leverage to push him out, particularly given the caucus decision not to tuck the Reform Act in its back pocket after the 2021 election. Election by the party at large lessens the leader’s accountability to the caucus and to the party faithful. The leader’s mandate is independent from that of the caucus. It came directly from the voters, a phenomenon that Poguntke and Webb describe as the “presidentialization” of party leadership selection.

Political parties do not exist in a vacuum, of course. Changes in internal party governance, including mechanisms for leadership selection, reflect broader trends in our political culture, including voter apathy and popular emphasis on celebrity influencers. It is no surprise that we are seeing more celebrities and people with pre-existing name recognition to enter politics and seek the top job immediately: the system rewards brand and familiarity above all else. Voters in leadership races might have little to no attachment to the party project. They joined to support a candidate.

In parliamentary systems like ours, we rely heavily on political parties to mobilize voters, recruit and support candidates, develop policy platforms, and either form government or hold government to account. We need political parties whether we like them or not.

Though in some ways, political parties are private clubs that make their own rules, they are also public institutions that exist primarily to contest public office. They play a huge role in how electoral democracy is practiced. The adoption of the one-member-one vote model of leadership selection helps parties to grow and to fundraise, but the unintended consequences should not be overlooked.

Policy Columnist Lori Turnbull is a professor in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University.