Tis the season.
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political convention, meeting of delegates of a political party at the local, state, provincial, or national level to select candidates for office and to decide party policy. As representative organs of political parties, party conventions—or party conferences as they are commonly called in Europe—also may elect executive committees of the parties and adopt rules governing the party’s organization. In practice they also act as rallies for the election campaigns that follow.
Before the development of conventions in the United States in the 1830s, American political parties selected candidates and policies in informal caucuses of the parties’ congressional delegations. Conventions were introduced to eliminate the abuses of the caucus system and were expected, through their open and public conduct of business, to be more democratic and less amenable to control by party bosses and machines. However, most of the real business of conventions was conducted in informal meetings of various delegates and leaders, and activity on the floor of the convention was usually merely a reflection of behind-the-scenes decisions and compromises. The corruption of the nomination process by party oligarchies prompted most states to adopt a system of primary elections for the nomination of candidates for state and local elective offices, though conventions continued to play an important role in endorsing party candidates.
