There is wide-spread hypocrisy in all discussions of democracy within political parties. For many MPs and party members acting according to democratic principles is fine when they are on the winning side in internal party elections or candidate selections but not when they are on the losing side.

But the evident hypocrisy is compounded by the fact that there is no single legitimate application of democratic principles in any situation, including within political parties. There are alternative ways of selecting party candidates. It can be done either at the local or state/national level. That is, by a vote of all local members for a local candidate or by involving all members at the higher level, either directly or through the state/national representative body. Many parties have rules which lay down a mixture of local and higher-level voting.

A major complicating factor is that pre-selections in many parties are contests not just between individuals but between competing factions. Those factions are sworn enemies, often highly ideological (no more so than in the Liberal Party today), and will do anything to win party preselections. Merit can become a secondary factor to factional affiliation and democratic principles are often used to justify factional manoeuvring.

Other considerations include the ability of the candidate to contribute to the parliament or even to win the seat. Not surprisingly then party leaders and party officials have a legitimate interest in who is pre-selected at the local level. They sometimes are tempted to intervene on behalf of celebrity candidates who are well-known-individuals whom the party wants in parliament because of their ministerial potential or other value. Julia Gillard, for example, exercised a Captain’s Pick to install Nova Peris as the Labor Senate candidate in the Northern Territory over the sitting Senator, Trish Crossin.

The latest flashpoint surrounds the NSW Liberal MP Craig Kelly and Senator Jim Molan, who are both members of the party’s right-faction. Kelly appeared to have lost the numbers among local members to win preselection in his seat of Hughes, while after the Senate preselection had been held Molan had been placed in the unwinnable fourth position on the Coalition ticket behind two other Liberals and a National candidate. Both went public and threatened dire retribution.

To save Kelly the Prime Minister Scott Morrison has lobbied the NSW party executive to cancel all preselections for Liberal candidates, and a deal about Molan’s future may be in the offing. Morrison may be acting to save like-minded MPs or merely to avoid instability in parliament and/or the party. Regardless of his motives his actions are contrary to the principle of local democracy.

The facts are always contested in these internal party struggles. But conservative Liberals in NSW seem to have been bitten by democratic party reforms which they themselves, including Molan, enthusiastically supported.

The Kelly and Molan cases are just the most recent flashpoints in party democracy. The Liberals’ so-called woman problem has also been involved. Only recently there were calls for Morrison to intervene to save the pre-selections of Jane Prentice MP in Queensland, who lost out, and Anne Sudmalis MP in NSW, who was eventually pre-selected. In both cases their pre-selection was threatened by machinations in local party branches.

Not long before, in 2016, two sitting senators in Tasmania, Richard Colbeck (Liberal) and Lisa Singh (Labor) were demoted by their state parties to unwinnable positions on their Senate tickets. Voter revulsion exercised by below-the-line voting saved Singh and almost saved Colbeck. But, of course, other than by breaking with their party by standing as an independent as Kelly threatened to do, a sitting MP in the House of Representatives defeated at their party preselection can’t be saved by voters like some Senate candidates.

These examples show how fragile modern political parties are and how vulnerable they are to manipulation of democratic principles. Membership of political parties has fallen dramatically which makes it relatively easy for a small branch or collection of branches in an electorate to be “taken over” or “reinvigorated” by new members, according to your point of view. The standard joke is that aspiring candidates with large families have an immediate advantage because they can all join up.

Careerism by ambitious candidates combines with all sorts of factional rorts. Furthermore, branch members can be narrow-minded or hide-bound, and branches can become the fiefdoms of local party chieftains lacking a broader vision.

Historically the dark side of local party democracy has been called branch-stacking and all sides of politics have played the game. Stacking has been associated with the exploitation of ethnic and religious networks. Often it was exercised by individuals paying for the memberships of large numbers of 'phantom' members. Parties responded to this danger by instituting attendance rules and requiring preselectors and candidates to have been members for a reasonable period.

Parties are also vulnerable to ideological infiltration, as the recent example of extreme right-wing membership in the NSW Nationals shows. If allowed to go unchecked this can begin to impact on the type of candidates preselected at the local level.

The lesson in all this is that the spotlight should be shone on internal party preselections because they are the major determinant of who ultimately sits in Parliament. The principles of party democracy should govern such preselections, but their application is bedevilled by factionalism and hypocrisy.

John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.