Party Switching and the Procedural Party Agenda in the US House of Representatives

Abstract

The importance of party affiliation in the United States may seem difficult to establish. Legislative parties in the United States are rather loose confederations of individuals who share a common party label but lack the discipline and uniformly high levels of party cohesion of their counterparts in many parliamentary systems. As a consequence of the primary system for selecting candidates to carry the party label in legislative election campaigns, party leaders lack an important tool for disciplining their rank and file. Moreover, the sizable contingent of independent and unaligned voters in the electorate may contribute to the relatively weak legislative parties in the United States (Wattenberg 1994, 1998). Given relatively loose legislative party discipline and relatively fluid party identification in the electorate, one might expect to observe frequent party switching among strategic political actors as they try to capture the benefits associated with membership in whichever party enjoys greater support among voters. Yet shifts in party affiliation among US House and Senate members have been rare. Specifically, only 38 Senators and 160 House members switched parties over a 163-year period (Nokken and Poole 2004).1KeywordsVote BehaviorProcedural VoteRepublican PartyProcedural MatterParty AffiliationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.