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The organization of primaries in which all party members can participate is increasingly used by political parties to select their leader. We focus here on one of the consequences of these procedures – participation rates. Based on general participation theories (mobilization theory, instrumental motivation theory and learning theory) in combination with insights into the introduction and functioning of leadership primaries, we expect that the first time a party organizes leadership primaries, participation rates will be high, but that they will decline gradually afterwards. We have focused on direct member votes for the selection of party leaders in Belgium, Israel and Canada. Our results show that participation rates are not influenced by how many times such a contest is held in a party (only first-time participation tends to be higher), but mainly by how competitive the contest is.
