In this paper, we analyze the selection by opportunistic parties of the candidates who run for election. We consider a setting with incomplete but symmetric information about the candidates' abilities, in which electoral campaigns provide voters withadditional information about candidates. Parties care only about selecting an appropriate candidate to win the election, while voters elect the best candidate conditional on their information. We first argue that in order to defeat an established very good candidate of its rival, a party may favor a new candidate with highly uncertain ability, rather than an established good candidate. Next, we establish that the discrepancy between the objective of parties and the objective of the electorate leads toinefficient conservatism in the selection of candidates, i.e. each party keeps its incumbents too often from the voters' viewpoint.
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