Intraparty competition - The neglected dimension of electoral politics

IntraCom is a project on intraparty competition, funded by the Academy of Finland for the period 2018-2022. The aim of the project is to offer a comprehensive understanding of why citizens are represented by certain types of politicians. Focusing on the selection and election of politicians, IntraComp sets out to analyse the strategies and behaviours of the three central actors of representative democracy: parties, candidates and voters. The Finnish open list system offers a great opportunity to study 1) party nomination strategies, 2) candidate strategies under conditions of intraparty competition for votes and 3) voter strategies when choosing between individual candidates on party lists. The project will apply several types of data and methods: for example, semi-structured interviews of party representatives, candidate data, survey data and experiments.