With the establishment of the national party convention, the process used to select the delegates to the national convention became of paramount importance. State and local party conventions selected the national convention delegates, but those conventions were often conducted in deeply undemocratic ways, excluding many party voters or using parliamentary rules such as winner-take-all and/or the unit rule to marginalize political minorities in the state. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party expressly endorsed the use of winner-take-all and unit-rule voting in the nomination process, which allowed party bosses to control the composition (and therefore candidate preference) of their state delegation. The Republicans were initially more hostile to boss control, forbidding the unit rule, but they, too, ultimately endorsed winner-take-all delegate selections in 1916. Moreover, both parties routinely seated delegates from states in which the convention process had been run in an undemocratic fashion. Thus, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the party convention process was run by a small coterie of party bosses, who ultimately chose the party’s nominee.