Sometimes you cannot have it all: Party switching and affiliation motivations as substitutes

Abstract

Existing research on when legislators switch parties reports inconsistent results about motivations for switching (e.g. office, ideology, and votes). I treat the motivations for party switching as substitutes and argue that many of the inconsistencies that persist can be explained by modelling the interactive effects between these motivations. For example, scholars differ in terms of whether they find that electoral considerations are an important determinant of party switching. The conflicting findings on the independent effects of electoral considerations are explained here by demonstrating that these effects are conditional on the level of office benefits a legislator enjoys, as well as the ideological distance between the legislator and party. More generally, the empirical analysis provides strong support for the substitution effect hypothesis. Thus, modelling interactive effects increases our understanding of party switching.