Defecting alone or splitting together? Individual and collective party switching by legislators

Abstract

While the nature of party switching is expected to have significant consequences for democratic representation, the current literature has not explored sufficiently the different dynamics that facilitate legislators to depart from their parties individually or collectively. We argue that target parties’ concerns about the policy consequences of absorbing an ideologically different group of legislators constrain the opportunities of factions even though they share the same electoral concerns as individual legislators. Turkey’s highly unstable legislative party system from 1991 to 2002 allows us to conduct a two-stage conditional logit analysis of party affiliation. In line with our theory, we find that individual switchers are affected by immediate electoral concerns while policy related factors matter most in cases of factional and/or collective switches.