Should I stay or should I go? Losers’ fate and the role of Spanish political parties in candidate renomination for regional executive office

Under what conditions do oppositional politicians in Western parliamentarian democracies repeat as candidates after losing their first election? Political leaders need to attain the highest executive offices to lead. But in most democracies this means that parties must previously select them as their candidates for those offices. Parties' intervention in candidate selection is thus a vital part of the game. However, this is still an understudied topic in Western parliamentarian politics. A few studies have analyzed losers’ fate, but they have exclusively focused on the US case where party machines have played for long a lesser role in leadership recruitment. This paper seeks therefore to make a contribution to the literature about the current role of party organizations for political leadership survival in party-centered parliamentarian countries by studying the specific case of candidates for the presidency of the Spanish Comunidades Autonómas.