The effect of party cohesion on voter choice is a common wisdom in electoral studies. This is also the argument party elites use to justify the existence of a single candidate for the post of party leader (normally referred as “coronations”). However the electoral consequences of competitive leadership selection events remain under-studied. Do candidates elected in primaries perform better? Or are primaries desired but also perceived by voters as a signal of an intra-party lack of cohesion? In this paper we want to assess the electoral impact of competitive leadership selection. We use an original dataset of leadership selection events at the regional level for the main parties in Canada, Germany and Spain since the early 1990s. In addition, we employ an experimental design to examine the effect of different intra-party selection procedures on vote choice. Our design also allows us to analyze why voters punish or reward candidates elected via different intra-party mechanisms.