The Story of a Selection

Abstract

Having set the context in chapters 4 and 5, this chapter presents the findings of a micro-level case study of a Scottish Labour constituency seat selection contest in the run-up to the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. It begins by briefly introducing the key ‘players’, identifying the main central, regional and local actors and organizations involved in the candidate selection process. The chapter then turns to the micro-level case study and traces the process through a detailed and fine-grained reconstruction of the temporal sequence of events in the constituency seat selection contest. The chapter concludes with a preliminary assessment of the case study, highlighting ongoing processes of decentralization and informalization in the candidate selection process, which the book returns to in the next chapter.