ABSTRACT
The selection of party candidates for elective office is a mechanism through which one kind of political recruitment takes place. Dealing with central-local relations in candidate selection raises a subject different from the breadth of participation as legally or customarily prescribed. The looseness, the individualism, and the interest-group influences characterizing American candidate selection are state as well as national phenomena. Dues-paying membership and organizational activism are the requisites for participating in candidate selection. Ordinary voters merely choose between the privately designated party candidates. The rarest of all the means for appealing from oligarchical candidate selection involves going to the larger portion of dues-paying members than that which attends meetings. Canadian candidate selection, while mainly oligarchical, is sprinkled with the relatively democratic open convention. The convention, incidentally, is in another respect an importation from the United States.
