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Political Parties and Legislative Party Switching

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Political Parties and Legislative Party Switching Edited by William B. Heller and Carol Mershon

POLITICAL PARTIES AND LEGISLATIVE PARTY SWITCHING

Copyright © William B. Heller and Carol Mershon, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60755–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Preface

xi

Part I 1

2

The Importance of Party Switching

Introduction: Legislative Party Switching, Parties, and Party Systems William B. Heller and Carol Mershon Integrating Theoretical and Empirical Models of Party Switching William B. Heller and Carol Mershon

3

29

Part II Party Switching and Representation 3

Switching Equilibria Norman Schof ield

4

Party Switching and the Procedural Party Agenda in the US House of Representatives Timothy P. Nokken

5

Party Switching in Brazil: Causes, Effects, and Representation Scott Desposato

55

81

109

Part III Party Switching, Party Competition, and Policy Making 6 Party Group Switching in the European Parliament Gail McElroy and Kenneth Benoit 7

Legislator Preferences, Party Desires: The Impact of Party Switching on Legislative Party Positions William B. Heller and Carol Mershon

147

173

vi 8

Contents Timing Matters: Incentives for Party Switching and Stages of Parliamentary Cycles Carol Mershon and Olga Shvetsova

201

Part IV Party Switching and the Dynamics of Party Systems 9

Competition for Power: Party Switching and Party System Change in Japan Junko Kato and Kentaro Yamamoto

233

10 Party Switching, Party Systems, and Political Representation Marcus Kreuzer and Vello Pettai

265

11

287

Conclusions William B. Heller and Carol Mershon

List of Contributors

295

Index

299

Figures and Tables

Figures 1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1

The legislative context for party switching The four stages of the switching game Activist coalitions in the United States Party positions in the Israeli Knesset 1996 A local Nash equilibrium in the Knesset in 1996 Party positions in the Knesset in 2003 Party positions in the Knesset in 2006 Total roll calls by vote types, 83rd to 107th Congresses Party polarization, 1879 to 2006, distance between parties on 1st DW-NOMINATE dimension DW-NOMINATE scores for 96th to 107th Congresses on final passage votes: 104th Congress party switchers DW-NOMINATE scores for 96th to 107th Congresses on Amendment votes: 104th Congress party switchers DW-NOMINATE scores for 96th to 107th Congresses on procedural votes: 104th Congress party switchers Party membership equilibria strategies—public goods without party control Party membership equilibria strategies—private goods without party control Party membership equilibria strategies—public goods with party control Party membership equilibria strategies—private goods with party control Party switching by month in the 49th and 50th Brazilian Chamber of Deputies Ideology and switching in the 50th Brazilian legislature European party groups and national members on the general left-right scale

15 39 59 67 68 70 71 91 96 96 97 97 115 116 117 118 128 139 159

viii 6.2 7.1 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

Figures and Tables Relationship of first factor to independent measures of left-right positions Parties with overlapping membership Switching behavior during the parliamentary cycle Mean weekly switches per 100 MPs (All and SMD), by substage in term, Russia and Italy Changes in distribution of seats among parties in Japanese house of representatives, 1993–2005 Changes in Shapley–Shubik index for Japanese parties, 1993–2005 Expected office payoffs to legislators ([SSI*100]/seats), by party, Japan 1993–2005 Comparison of party policy positions in Japan: The 1996 expert survey Comparison of party policy positions in Japan: The 2000 expert survey Comparison of party policy positions in Japan: The 2003 expert survey Comparison of party policy positions in Japan: The 2005 expert survey Types of party switching Levels of party system institutionalization Types of party Effects of hopping

162 175 203 212 243 245 246 255 255 256 256 268 269 277 280

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1

The definition and measurement of switches and types of switches 9 Illustrations of the incidence of switching (% MPs ever switched) in established and new democracies 11 The incidence and impact of switching 13 Seats, votes, and valences in the Knesset 67 House defectors and change in aggregate DW-NOMINATE scores, 1953–2004 90 House defectors and the statistical significance of changes in aggregate voting, 1953–2002 93 House party defectors’ change in DW-NOMINATE scores, 1953–2002 99 Party switching rates in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies 110

Figures and Tables

ix

5.2 Typologies of legislative party systems 5.3 Payoffs of party membership 5.4 Conditional logit model of affiliation decisions 5.5 Impact of selected party characteristics on predicted probability of membership 5.6 Impact of transaction costs on probability of switching 5.7 Party agreement scores 5.8 Switching and party agreement scores 5.9 Party influence measures—Dimension 1 5.10 Party influence measures—Dimension 2 6.1 Political party groups in the European Parliament pre-2004 election 6.2 Party group volatility in the European Parliament 6.3 Dimension reduction of policy contestation 6.4 Conditional logit model of party choice 6.5 Conditional logit model of individual MEP switching, third Parliament 7.1 Expectations: Party positions as a function of party-member positions 7.2 Party positions as a function of party-member positions 7.3 Changes in the size of party groups, X and XI Legislatures, Italy 7.4 Changes in the size of party groups, XII and XIII Legislatures, Italy 8.1 Case selection: Countries and legislative terms 8.2 Operationalizing stages of the parliamentary cycle 8.3 Mean weekly switches per 100 MPs, Italy and Russia 8.4 Mean monthly switches per 100 MPs, 35 country-terms 8.5 Switching to create new parliamentary parties, 37 country-terms 9.1 Illustrations of the decisive majority 9.2 Switchers from the NFP to the DPJ and the LDP between 1996 and 2000 9.3 Switchers from the LP to the DPJ between 2000 and 2003 9.4 DPJ legislators in October 2003: Inswitchers and loyalists

111 115 129 130 130 134 135 138 138 150 153 161 165 167 186 187 192 192 206 208 210 217 221 236 252 253 258


Preface

Political parties and democratic politics go hand in hand. Since parties matter, it matters too when legislators and other elected politicians change party affiliation. The phenomenon of party switching becomes puzzling when the switch occurs during a politician’s term of office. Why would a sitting legislator who won his seat under one party label jump to another during a legislative term? What are the effects of such switches? This book investigates these and related questions. Scholarship arises from curiosity, advances through some form of collaboration, and typically requires financial support as well. In the late 1990s, the coeditors of this book first discussed the curious frequency of legislative party switching in Italy, when we met for dinner at one of the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association. In our collaboration, one thing has led to another, including this book. We first coauthored several conference papers on the phenomenon of party switching, and then, in 2003, we secured support from the National Science Foundation for collaborative research (NSF SES-0339920 to Heller and SES-0339877 to Mershon, for “Collaborative Research on Legislative Party Switching: Integrating Theoretical and Comparative Empirical Analyses”). This book represents the culmination of that project and of the joint work of the 12-member Research Work Group on Legislative Party Switching, which we recruited and co-chaired. We and the other contributors to the volume are convinced that the study of elected politicians’ changes and choices of party affiliation can enrich the understanding of political parties, legislative politics, policy making, and democratic representation. The first two chapters and the concluding chapter perhaps emphasize this conviction most strongly. All chapters, however, seek to demonstrate the analytical purchase to be gained from considering party switching as one of the

xii

Preface

possible results of the strategic interactions between legislators and party leaders. All share as a premise and as a theme the notion that taking party switching seriously sheds new light on issues of enduring importance in political science. The contributors to this volume investigate a wide range of empirical settings, from Western Europe to the Baltics, from the United States to Japan, from Russia and Romania to Brazil. At the same time, the research integrates formal and empirical approaches to the study of politicians’ decisions on party affiliation. To identify this book as the culmination of our work is to point to prior stages of collaboration. The Party Switching Research Group (PSRG) held its first meeting at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, July 2004, and its second meeting at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, July 2005. The group also organized panels, featuring papers from several of the contributors here, at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association and the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Both meetings of the PSRG qualified as true workshops, with wide-ranging conversations, informal presentations, and active debate and discussion among all participants. We welcomed and profited from the participation of several political scientists who were not strictly speaking members of the PSRG, including graduate students and, in Dublin, Daniela Giannetti from the faculty of the Università di Bologna. This book and the research that underpins it benefited greatly from the contributions of several key players. The first is Michael Laver, who as a member of the PSRG prepared papers for Dublin and Charlottesville. As then-chair of the Department of Political Science at Trinity College, moreover, Laver also was a generous and gracious host for our Dublin meetings. As it turned out, Laver did not write a chapter for the book, but his voice in the conversations and collaboration remains. We also acknowledge the very helpful comments of John Aldrich, offered at several stages in this project, and the thoughtful remarks of Dave Clark, Daniela Giannetti, Dan Gingerich, Mikhail Filippov, Michael McDonald, Lucio Renno, Keith Poole, and Katri Sieberg. We extend our deep thanks to all of these individuals. We are grateful in addition to a number of research assistants who in one way or another have made it possible for us to pursue research and writing on legislative party switching: Nina Barzachka, Robin Best, B.J. Bloom, Susan Brewer, Adriana Buliga-Stoian, Daniela Coleman, Lindsay Flynn, Weiwei Hu, Miriam Hurley, Rado Iliev, Drew Kurlowski, Sam Seeley, Jon Shoup-Mendizabal, and Julie VanDusky. All have facilitated our work and have earned our thanks.

Preface

xiii

We have been fortunate to work with Emily Hue, Asa Johnson, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, and Toby Wahl at Palgrave Macmillan. We greatly appreciate their expertise and advice in shepherding the book through to publication. We dedicate this book to our families, for their love, joy, and ability to pull us away from our work. Will thanks Tere, Norma, and Andrea for their patience and willingness to put up with the various travels (and other travails) involved in bringing this book to fruition. It has been a learning experience all around, and their sacrifices and support are deeply appreciated. They may never read it, but they are present on every page. Carol dedicates the book to Lyle and Harriette, whose example and inspiration remain. Their presence too echoes throughout the book.


I

The Importance of Party Switching


1 Introduction: Legislative Party Switching, Parties, and Party Systems William B. Heller and Carol Mershon

1.1 Political Parties and the Question of Party Switching That political parties are fundamental to the functioning of modern democracies is well known. Politicians build their careers within parties, parties convey information to voters about candidate preferences, and parties provide labels that identify candidates to voters. When voters choose candidates for office, they delegate decision making on public policy to parties and to party-identified representatives. Repeated elections give voters the opportunity to hold parties responsible and accountable for policy decisions and outcomes. Parties thus are indispensable elements of democratic delegation and representation (Cox 1997; Filippov, Ordeshook, and Shvetsova 2004; Powell 2000; Schattschneider 1942; Stokes 1999). Honing in on the legislative arena highlights the vital role of parties. In the United States, the majority party in each chamber organizes that chamber, filling all legislative offices and managing the flow of legislation (Cox and McCubbins 1993; 2005). Parties manage the business of the legislature in parliamentary systems too, albeit generally through their control of the executive (Cox 1987). This control, along with the tight discipline commonly ascribed to parliamentary parties (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999), means that majority parties (or coalitions) in parliamentary systems not only manage the legislative process, but also determine legislative outcomes (see, e.g., Baron 1998; Heller 2001; Huber 1996; Laver and Schofield 1990; Martin and Vanberg 2004; 2005). Given the essential place of parties, it seems reasonable to expect legislators to stick to the party labels under which they have won election.

4

William B. Heller and Carol Mershon

In many democracies, much of the time, this expectation is upheld, as is generally the case in the established parliamentary systems of Western Europe (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999). In some settings, however, it is not uncommon for elected legislators to abandon one party and enter another, even during the legislative term. For instance, approximately one-fourth of the members of the Italian lower house switched parties at least once during the 1996–2001 legislature (Heller and Mershon 2005; 2008), and more than one-third of the Brazilian MPs elected in 1986 had transferred from one party to another by late 1990 (Mainwaring and Pérez Liñán 1997). Observers of politics have recorded legislators hopping parties relatively frequently in such diverse contexts as Fourth Republic France (MacRae 1967), Hungary and the Czech Republic (Àgh 1999), Russia between 1993 and 1995 (White, Rose, and McAllister 1997), Papua New Guinea and India (Miskin 2003), and the United States during what political scientists deem to be periods of realignment (Canon and Sousa 1992; for additional examples of abundant switching, see section 1.3 and Mershon and Shvetsova 2007). The null hypothesis—that politicians hold fast to the party affiliations they at first choose—evidently fails to hold uniformly. Compared to the null, even an annual average of a single switcher, sustained more than a century—the record for both chambers combined in Australia since federation (see Miskin 2003, 4)—and the two-score switches in the House and Senate since 1947 (Nokken 2000) command attention. Why do politicians switch parties, and to what effect? That overarching question motivates the research in this book. Despite its manifestation across countries and continents, party switching remains an understudied phenomenon. This is not to say that students of legislative and party politics have neglected it entirely, but rather that they have underestimated the breadth and depth of its significance. In line with the common sense intuition that legislators should stick with the parties that got them elected, scholars have tended to treat switching as anomalous (and undesirable) behavior symptomatic of some underlying system-wide condition, such as electoral realignment (Canon and Sousa 1992) or a weakly institutionalized party system (Mainwaring 1999; Mainwaring and Torcal 2005). Switching can be these things, but it also is much more. First, switching can occur even in the most stable of systems. Second, even when party switching (presumably) indicates some underlying disease of the body politic, its importance goes far beyond any utility it has as a diagnostic tool. Simply put, party switching has vital normative, theoretical, and substantive implications.

Introduction

5

The next section here elaborates on the implications of party switching. Section 1.3 provides a definition and typology of switching, used in common by all contributors to this volume, and also surveys the incidence of switching. The fourth section takes stock of extant research on switching and the place of switching within research on legislative and party politics. This introductory chapter closes with an overview of the other chapters that make up the book.

1.2 The Implications and Importance of Party Switching The normative concerns raised by party switching center on accountability, responsibility, and representation. At least at first blush, the link between voters and politicians is undermined if voters elect a politician as a candidate of one party and he or she jumps to another during the legislative term, without consulting his or her constituents at the polls. All the same, analysts should be wary of assuming or arguing that party switching impairs democratic representation. If representatives are in essence seat holders for their parties, if voters choose representatives based solely or at least primarily on their party affiliation, and if switchers adopt the priorities of their new parties, then switching indeed amounts to a betrayal of democratic representation. These are big “ifs,” however, and to the extent that they do not obtain, it is possible that switching might even improve representation, not undermine it. The validity of the presumption that legislators are seat holders for their parties depends on how voters choose and view their representatives, which in turn depends in part on electoral and legislative rules, as well as on the party system. If voters vote purely on the basis of party label, without reference to the identities of individual candidates, then sitting legislators are indeed agents of their parties and only indirectly of voters. Such party-focused voting seems most likely in systems with closed-list electoral rules (Carey and Shugart 1995), but even here there is room for individual candidates to entice some voters to choose one party over another, or at least to go to the polls rather than stay at home on election day (e.g., on Spain see Bruneau et al. 2001). In this context, party switching is a betrayal of democratic representation as long as party positions remain fixed or at least faithful to party voters: if parties drift, whether because their membership changes (e.g., as a result of elections, by-elections, or

6


switching), their leadership changes, or for some other reason, then party members who want to remain faithful to the voters who elected them might have no recourse but to seek a new party home (Crewe and King 1995; Hopkin 1999; Mair and Marsh 2004; Miskin 2003).1 In chapter 7, we cast doubt on the notion that party positions are fixed when we show that party positions in legislative voting are determined in some measure by the preferences of party members, and changes in party membership occasion changes in party positions. Switchers thus cause movements in party positions that potentially could make parties—or at least policy making—more representative, rather than less so. The third assumption, that switchers adapt to their party positions, does seem to hold in at least some cases. It is borne out by evidence from the US House (Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart 2001; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001; and cf. Nokken this volume) and Brazil (Desposato this volume), where low levels of observed party unity make expectations of party influence over legislator behavior seem a priori unrealistic. Which is more important for outcomes, changes in party positions or changes in legislators’ behavior, is an empirical question that hinges in part on party discipline and in part on how other legislative players respond to changes in individual legislator or party positions (Best and Heller 2005). Finally, the significance of switching also might depend on the degree to which it affects outcomes. The normative implications of party switching, in short, must be disentangled with care. They are likely to depend greatly on the institutional context and on the array of individual and party preferences in the legislature, as well as the extent to which voters care about “descriptive” or “symbolic” representation alone (e.g., the simple presence of ethnic minorities in the legislature) versus the ability to influence political and policy outcomes. On the theoretical front, party switching provides new and powerful leverage on prominent, longstanding questions in the study of politics. Principal among these is the issue of “why parties” (Aldrich 1995; McElroy 2003, 21), which subsumes questions of what parties are, what they do, and how they influence (and are influenced by) individual legislators. Research on switching illuminates not only parties and party discipline but also the dynamics of party systems. Students of legislative politics typically—albeit usually implicitly— assume parties to be stable entities. Work on government coalitions in parliamentary democracies routinely rests on the same assumption.

Introduction

7

In probing the conditions under which this assumption fails to hold, examination of party switching can “lift the lid” on parties (Laver 1998, 22) and set out guidelines for linking analytically the microfoundations of parties to legislative organization and governance, and to interparty competition at and between elections. Party switching opens a new window onto party systems, enabling the analyst to see and treat partisan identities not as fixed and exogenous but as fluid and endogenous, to examine the processes whereby politicians choose party identities at one election, reevaluate them during the life of the legislature, and potentially revisit partisan identities again at the next election. Systematic thinking about party switching thus affords novel insight into the dynamics, evolution, and institutionalization of party systems (cf., e.g., Laver and Benoit 2003; Mainwaring and Torcal 2005). Substantively, party switching matters because it can at least potentially alter policy bargaining in the legislature and even government composition. Party switchers in Spain (see Tomás Mallén 2002) have brought down local governments, for instance, and Senator Jeffords’s defection from the Republican Party in 2001 changed the balance of power in the US Senate, giving the Democrats a degree of agenda authority that elections had denied them. Similarly, in Canada, one MP’s May 2005 defection from the opposition Conservative Party to join the minority Liberal cabinet helped the government survive a vote of no confidence (Economist 2005b; 2005a). Absent such obvious swings in the legislative balance, party switching still can affect the legislative bargaining context by changing parties’ seat shares and policy positions, with possible repercussions that include the allocation of ministerial portfolios among government parties (since a coalition party’s share of cabinet portfolios is roughly proportional to its contribution to the seats controlled by the government; Browne and Franklin 1973; Mershon 2001; 2002; Schofield and Laver 1985; cf. Mershon 2008), the allocation of legislative committee seats among parties (Yoshinaka 2005), parties’ ability to impose voting discipline on their members (Heller and Mershon 2008; see also, Best and Heller 2005), and, as a consequence of all of this, policy outcomes. The basic point is that party switching is neither as rare nor as idiosyncratic as conventional wisdom suggests. Indeed, focusing on party switching highlights the observed stability in parties and party systems as an equilibrium, the result of legislator and party leadership strategies developed partially in response to the possibility of switching. The contributors to this volume take seriously that possibility. To

8


investigate it, of course, they need common terminology and analytical instruments, to which we now turn.

1.3

The Phenomenon of Party Switching

1.3.1

Definition and typology

All contributors to the book adopt the term “switch” as the umbrella label for any recorded change in party affiliation on the part of a politician holding or competing for elective office. As table 1.1 indicates, operationalizing this basic definition depends on the type of register of switches that is available. For instance, membership lists may be maintained at the level of the parliamentary group and made available relatively infrequently, as for the European Parliament (EP) and Russia. Or the national legislature may provide chronologies of each move executed, each day, as for Canada and Italy. Additional possibilities exist. The point is that the empirical analysis of switching hinges on the nature of the records at the disposal of the researcher. We identify different types of switches in four ways, as table 1.1 exhibits. First, switches may be distinguished by direction. In the United States, Senator Jeffords exited the Republicans in 2001, effecting an “outswitch,” without officially carrying out an “inswitch” into the Democrats. Even as an Independent, as noted, Jeffords handed majority control of the Senate to the Democrats. Operationalizing this distinction depends as well on party and legislative records. If inswitches and outswitches are not recorded separately, information on one must be inferred from information on the other. Second, switches may be classified by their impact on the number of legislative parties (or groups or factions or fractions). Both the raw number and the effective number of parties2 are useful, since they tap changes in the legislative bargaining context somewhat differently; such changes in context matter, in turn, because they might affect the calculations of potential switchers. Whereas switches across two existing parties leave intact the number of parties, the number of parties changes with other types—fission (i.e., the splintering of a single party into two or more distinct parties), fusion (where two or more parties merge into one), and start-up (where switchers from multiple parties join to create a new one).3 Third, switches may be distinguished by how isolated or close in time they are relative to other moves. When individual switches are isolated in time, it makes sense to consider them as independent from

Table 1.1

The definition and measurement of switches and types of switches

Label

Definition

Measure and/or comment

Umbrella label: Switch

Change in party affiliation

Measure is recorded change in affiliation; data depend on how (and how often) legislature or party records change

Formal adoption of new label by MP after having another label Abandonment of one label in favor of another

Data depend on whether inswitch and outswitch are recorded separately

1—Type by direction Inswitch

Outswitch

2—Type by impact on N parties Both the raw number and the effective number of parties hold interest Across existing parties Fission Fusion Start-up

Move leaves intact raw N parties Existing party splits to create two or more new Two or more extant parties merge to create one new Move founds new party with MPs from multiple parties

3—Type by relative timing Legislative (or party) records determine how fine-grained temporally data can be Solo Simultaneous Near-simultaneous

Move isolated from others in time Same day (week, etc.) as other moves Close in time to other moves

Coordination of moves (or, related but distinct, signaling) may or may not occur

4—Type by degree of (apparent) choice Rule-driven move

Move forced by parliamentary rules

Voluntary

Any move not driven by rules

Example of rule is minimum of 20 MPs in parliamentary group Includes moves recorded as expulsions

10


each other. When legislators’ changes of party affiliation occur simultaneously or nearly so, by contrast, their moves might well be coordinated. For instance, switches might cluster in time as legislators respond to the initiatives of a political entrepreneur starting up a new party, or they might come in response to actual or expected partysystem changes that switching could provoke (cf. the conclusions and contributions by Kato and Yamamoto, Kreuzer and Pettai, Mershon and Shvetsova, and Schofield of this volume). With or without deliberate coordination, near-simultaneous switches on the part of one set of actors may signal to others a change in shared aims. Switches also could be orchestrated as one legislative party helps another meet a minimum threshold for official recognition—and rights—as a parliamentary party group. Of course, clusters of switches could be coincidental, or, more likely, a common (but essentially individual) response to some exogenous shock. Fourth, switches may be distinguished by the degree to which the actors involved are able to exercise free choice. Parliamentary rules governing the formation, membership, and importance of legislative parties can lead to forced switches, as when a party’s membership dips below some rule-defined threshold and its label disappears, forcing its members to switch into some other established group, to merge with other MPs to form a new group, or to fall into the mixed group or become independents. Another variant of involuntary moves might seem to come in the form of expulsions; yet since elected politicians can be assumed to exercise some degree of foresight, it is reasonable to view expulsions as in essence stemming from voluntary choice. On the flip side, laws, party rules, or interparty agreements may formally constrain MPs’ ability to switch parties: For example, in 1982, the Spanish Cortes prohibited MPs from joining groups (other than the mixed group) later than five days after the start of the legislative session (Sánchez de Dios 1999, 151), and in 1998, Spanish parties signed a “pact” designed to discourage switching at lower levels of governance (Santero 1998).

1.3.2

Incidence

As we and other contributors to the literature on party switching have indicated, the incidence of switching varies across countries— that is, across institutional contexts and party systems. Even where switching is rare, it is not utterly absent and its occurrence varies over time. Against stereotype, as table 1.2 shows, the phenomenon

Introduction

11

is not confined to new democracies or weakly institutionalized party systems. Table 1.2 includes but is not limited to the country cases examined in our book. Tables 1.2 and 1.3 below are brief and simple, yet ambitious and unique in the field. To our knowledge, nothing like them exists in the available literature; we thus construct them from some two dozen sources.4 The contributors to this volume go well beyond the observation of how many MPs switch parties in a legislative term, focusing on the motivations for, and the effects of, switching. In so doing, they take switching as a product of individual choice (whether coordinated or not), with consequences that can range from the level of the individual switcher to the party system as a whole.

Table 1.2 Illustrations of the incidence of switching (% MPs ever switched) in established and new democracies System

Term 1: % switched

Term 2: %

Term 3: %

Term 4: %

Australia Brazil Britain Canada Denmark* EP* France Germany Hungary Italy Japan New Zealand* Romania Russia South Africa Spain Turkey Ukraine United States

1975–1977: 3 1991–1994: 39 1974–1979: 1 1993–1997: 2 1966–1968: 3 1989–1994: 16 1997–2002: 4 1969–1972: 2 1990–1994: 13 1988–1992: 27.6 2000–2003: 7 1993–1996: 12 1992–1996: 11 1993–1995: 33 1999–2004: 6 1982–1986: 1 1961–1965: 22 1998–2002: 56 1991–1993: 0.2

1977–1980: 0 1994–1998: 33 1979–1983: 5 1997–2000: 4

1980–1983: 0 1998–2001: 36 1983–1987: 0 2000–2004: 9

1983–1984: 0

2002–2007: 10 1972–1976: 0.4 1994–1996: 6** 1992–1994: 33.7

1987–1992: 1 2004–2006: 2 1994–1998: 2

1976–1980: 0.2

1980–1983: 1

1994–1996: 34.4

1996–2000: 32.1

1996–1999: 6 1996–2000: 17

2000–2004: 10

2004–2009: 2** 1986–1989: 12 1965–1969: 21

1989–1993: 1 1969–1973: 23

1993–1996: 0.3 1973–1977: 10

1993–1995: 0

1995–1997: 1

1997–1999: 0.5

* Unicameral legislature; all other data pertain to lower houses. ** First two years of four-year term (Hungary); first 2.5 years of five-year term (South Africa). Sources: Ágh (1999, 172, 182); Australia, Parliament (2007); Booysen (2006, 735); Butler and Butler (2000, 248–249); Canada, House of Commons (2006); Bille and Pedersen (2004, 216); Corstange (2000); Desposato (2006, 69; this volume); France (2007); Heller and Mershon (2008); Kato and Yamamoto (2005, Table 2); Left Socialist Party, Denmark, 1997; McElroy (2003, 4); Mershon and Shvetsova (2007; 2008a); Miskin (2003, 17, 31); Nokken (this volume); Nokken and Poole (2004, 555); Schindler (1999, 926–929); South Africa, Parliament (2008); Thames (2005, 9, 24); Tomás Mallén (2002, 207–216); Turan (1985, 23).

12


1.4 Extant Research on Switching: Lessons and Open Questions The forces that drive individual MPs’ decisions on party membership have attracted the attention of analysts of party switching. In particular, the contributors to this volume agree on the centrality of legislator ambition in choices and changes of party affiliation. Together, the available theoretical models and empirical findings (including contributions to this volume) highlight office perks, policy influence, and electoral advantage as motives for “jumping ship” (Aldrich and Bianco 1992; Desposato 2006; Heller and Mershon 2005; 2008; Laver and Benoit 2003; Mejía Acosta 1999; Mershon and Shvetsova 2005; 2008a; 2008b; Reed and Scheiner 2003; on multiple aims for parties, see Müller and Strøm 1999; Strøm 1990). Hence, switching not only is widespread but also is the product of strategic behavior, of a calculus of cost and benefit on the part of the individual legislator who faces incentives and constraints in his or her institutional environment (e.g., Desposato 2006; this volume; Heller and Mershon 2005; 2008; ch. 2 this volume; Kato and Yamamoto this volume; Mershon and Shvetsova 2008a; 2008b; this volume). More to the point, as strategic behavior switching has a profound impact on policy and politics. For instance, as illustrated in table 1.3, switchers in Canada have strengthened the hand of a new Premier, and those in France have forced government concessions on the budget (Huber 1996, 21, 154–159). Mobile German MPs have ruptured a governing coalition (Keesing’s Contemporary Archives 1957, 15757– 15759); their counterparts in Brazil and the Ukraine have enlarged the presidential majority (Ames 2001, 191–192, 273–276; Thames 2005, 9, 24), and in Japan have endowed the Liberal Democrats with a majority (Kato and Yamamoto this volume). Switchers in Spain have created “dysfunctionalities” in committee (Tomás Mallén 2002, 296–303); those in the EP and the United States have earned rewards via committee assignments (McElroy 2003; Mershon and Shvetsova 2008a; Yoshinaka 2005). The literature currently furnishes evidence on relationships between MPs’ ambition and goals, on the one hand, and institutional variables, on the other. For example, in the United Kingdom, the prime minister’s use of cabinet office to reward loyalists, which developed in the 1890s (Cox 1987), inhibited switching in phases of unidimensional party competition (Mershon and Nokken 2008). Under open-list proportional representation (PR) in Brazil, the automatic

Table 1.3

The incidence and impact of switching: Illustrations from established and new democracies

System

House

% Switched (MPs in house)

Australia Brazil Britain Canada Canada Denmark EP France Germany India Italy Japan New Zealand Russia South Africa Spain Spain Ukraine United States

lower lower lower lower lower unicameral unicameral lower lower state-level lower lower unicameral lower lower lower upper lower lower

n.a. (75–150) 36 (513) 5 (635) 9 (301) 1 (308) 2 (175) 15 (518) 7 (577) 7 (487) m.d. (30–403) 25 (630) m.d. (480) 6 (120) 33 (450) 6 (400) 12 (345) 11 (260) 56 (450) 1 (435)

Total Switches 97 262 29 36 4 4 81 41 49 2,700 277 40 7 342 23 55 38 527 5

Term(s) Covered

Example of Effect of Switching

1901–2003 1998–2002 1979–1983 2000–2004 2004–2006 1994–1998 1989–1994 1988–1993 1953–1957 1957–1973 1996–2001 2000–2003 1996–1999 1993–1995 1999–2004 1986–1989 1986–1989 1998–2002 1995–1997

one split led to rival’s “hegemony” switchers pipe more pork to win electoral challenge to Labour strengthened hand of new PM government survived confidence vote SDP moved rightward switchers shape policy in committee government concessions on budget government composition changed in 1956 ~ 45 state governments fell fall of government in 1998 LDP gained majority in 2001 minority government ruled from 1997 to 1999 switchers grab agenda advantage law on switching in constitutional court “dysfunctionalities” in committee “dysfunctionalities” in committee presidential majority enlarged switchers shape policy in committee

n.a. = not applicable. m.d. = missing data (not reported or cannot be constructed from source). Sources: Ames (2001, 46–47); Belford (2005); Bille and Pedersen (2004, 216); Booysen (2006, 735); Canada, House of Commons (2006); CBC News (2003a; 2003b); Corstange (2000); Crewe and King (1995, 104, ch. 23); Desposato (2006, 69); Economist (2005b; 2005a); Huber (1996, 21, 154–159); Kato and Yamamoto (2005, 14–16, Table 1); Keesing’s Contemporary Archives (1957, 15757–15759); Lalvani (2005, 133–134); McElroy (2003, 4); Mershon and Heller (2003, 18); Mershon and Shvetsova (2008a, 104, 122–123); Miskin (2003); Nokken (this volume); Nokken and Poole (2004, 555); Thames (2005, 9, 24); Tomás Mallén (2002, 207–209, 296–303).

14


renomination of MPs has lowered the electoral costs of switching (Desposato 2003; 2006). Under open-list PR in Poland, incumbents switch to the opposition when economic performance is poor, as part of (typically successful) bids for reelection (Zielinski, Slomczynski, and Shabad 2005). One lesson from the extant literature that, in our view, too often remains implicit or is even ignored is that observed switching is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. To appreciate the point, note that the key insight underlying thinking on the strategic doctrine of mutual assured destruction was that the infrequency of the use of nuclear weapons testified not to the absence of a credible nuclear threat, but rather to the strength of the threat and the consequent effectiveness and power of mutual deterrence (Waltz 1990). Analogously, if—under some conditions—changes of party affiliation are infrequent (Norway provides a real-world example of stable legislative party membership), this observation can reflect the presence, effectiveness, and power, not the absence, of MPs’ strategic threats to switch or reconsider party affiliation, and of party leaders’ strategic moves to keep their legislative followings intact. For Britain, Crewe and King (1995, esp. 479) explicitly analyze 40 potential recruits to the SDP who remained in the Labour Party.5 The contributions to this volume are also explicitly premised on the notion that observed switching is the start, not the end, of the story. As we discuss in chapter 2, parties (i.e., party leaders in one form or another) seek to manipulate potential switchers, deterring or encouraging their moves (depending on context) with carrots or sticks, buying them off or threatening or imposing sanctions. MPs as a result decide whether to switch in a continuous calculus of affiliation that under some circumstances has the potential to change parties and possibly even legislative party systems (see Best 2008; Mershon and Shvetsova 2007). These can be viewed as transactions costs (Desposato 2006), but also as the product of strategic interaction. To elaborate, the transactions costs that dampen switching may be viewed as largely exogenous constraints. At one extreme, rules on ballot access might deprive switchers of their prerogative to run at the next election. At the other extreme, rules might enable any incumbent, regardless of switching behavior, to be automatically renominated (the case in Brazil until 2002, as stressed by Desposato). Internal legislative rules may lower the attractiveness—and hence the probability—of switching if, for example, parties control committee seats, so that MPs risk losing treasured committee positions if they

Introduction

15

change parties (see Desposato 2006). In Spain, for instance, legislative rules restrict switching to a very short span of time (Sánchez de Dios 1999; Tomás Mallén 2002). From the perspective we take in this book, as noted earlier, any observed stability in parties and party systems must be understood as an equilibrium result of legislator and party leadership strategies developed partially in response to the possibility of switching. Chapter 2 captures these strategic interactions in a four-stage game. For now, Figure 1.1 depicts these relationships among voters, legislators, party leaders, and the legislative party system and highlights the central role of institutions in mediating and structuring their interactions. The four basic elements of legislative politics illustrated in Figure 1.1 have long attracted political scientists’ attention. Our focus on party switching allows us to locate them all in the same theoretical framework and subject them to consistent, coherent empirical investigation. Although normative and positive studies of representation focus on the relationship between voters and their representatives, in the bottom left quadrant of the figure (e.g., Barnes 1977; Kohno 1997; Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999), for instance, and research into elections and electoral rules investigates the links occupying either the upper left or the lower left quadrant (Cox 1997; Duverger 1964; Grofman and Lijphart 1986; Riker 1982), each type of study tends to refer to the other as an afterthought at best. Scholars on the US Congress take the lead in examining relationships between legislators and party leaders (on major debates in the vast literature, see Cox and McCubbins 1993; 2005; Krehbiel 1991; for prominent examples of comparative work, see Cox 1987; Döring 1995; Müller

Legislative Party System

Voters

Institutions

Legislators

Figure 1.1

The legislative context for party switching.

Party Leaders

16


and Strøm 1999; Strøm 1990), but rarely—and understandably, given their tight focus on politics in the United States—do they examine legislative party systems.6 Studies of parties and party systems (the upper right quadrant in the figure), for their part, tend to leave voters very much in the background and, as noted, view parties and party systems as stable (the classic case, as well as the classic example, is Lipset and Rokkan 1967). These studies do not focus specifically on legislative party systems and thus neglect the possibility of legislative party switching as a source of change in party systems broadly defined. More broadly, the place of party switching is underestimated in all four well-tilled fields represented in the quadrants of figure 1.1. Just as each of the four quadrants in the figure has attracted substantial scholarly attention, so too has the role of institutions in the different quadrants. Different electoral rules yield varying incentives for sitting legislators to care about what their constituents want, for instance, hence fundamentally affecting the relationship between represented and representatives. Legislative and party rules, as well as electoral rules, define how closely a sitting legislator will be identified as a servant of his or her party versus an agent of his or her constituents. And party and legislative rules, within the parameters described by individual legislators’ independence, on one hand, and the legislative party system on the other, define party leaders’ ability unilaterally to set party objectives, induce the compliance of the party rank and file, and generally make a mark on policy. Other types of rules also have important consequences for political processes and outcomes—for example, whether a legislature is unicameral or bicameral (see, e.g., Druckman, Martin, and Thies 2003; Druckman and Thies 2001; Heller 1997; 2001; 2007; Tsebelis and Money 1997), or whether the system is presidential or parliamentary (Huber 1992; Moe and Caldwell 1994)—precisely because they structure how much actors with influence in decision making can cleave to their own desires versus follow someone else’s lead. As the contributions to this volume make abundantly clear, these institutional effects are crucial to legislators’ decisions about their party affiliation. This aspect of the impact of institutions on legislative politics is, however, essentially ignored by most scholars; the resulting understanding of legislative, party, electoral, and constitutional rules thus is incomplete. Once we see switching as the product of strategic calculation, we have to consider the role of reelection prospects in switchers’ calculations. After all, legislative careers grind to a halt for politicians who fail to win elections. In this vein, Grose and Yoshinaka (2003) find

Introduction

17

that switchers in the US Congress are less often reelected than are nonswitchers. Schmitt (1999) shows the same in a comparison of switchers and nonswitchers in the Brazilian lower house. Mershon and Heller (2003) also find that deputies who switch parties in Spain win reelection at lower rates than their less-mobile peers; Heller and Mershon (2005, note 9) observe that switchers are both less likely than nonswitchers to run for reelection and to be reelected if they do run. The easy inference would be that switching often carries an electoral cost. That inference should not be embraced too hastily, however, for this issue requires counterfactual thinking and more. If the switcher had stayed put, would he have faced some form of demotion (placement low on the party list, movement to a district where the party is historically weak) that would have increased the probability of electoral defeat had he not switched? Who among switchers and nonswitchers decides not to run again? What kinds of candidates challenge those who have switched versus those who have not? Of course, the electoral prospects of switchers depend also on factors beyond their own behavior or control, not least among which are national or local trends that affect party performance (and also could motivate switching). As Kato and Yamamoto emphasize in this volume, the electoral prospects of switchers hinge as well on the nominating strategies of the parties (of the party leaderships) that have accepted them as new members. The proper baseline for analyzing the consequences of switching is what would have happened in the absence of switching. It is important, in other words, to consider counterfactuals; reelection is just one instance—albeit perhaps the most obvious—where this awareness of what might have been is vital. The key point is that the choice to switch parties is strategic, and the unobserved decision not to switch—we cannot, after all, easily tell who among nonswitchers might have entertained the idea of moving to a different party (but see Crewe and King 1995)—also is strategic. This treatment of strategy, choice, and chance leads naturally to the next section’s preview of the overall architecture of the book.

1.5 Map of the Book All of the chapters here build on a common theoretical foundation and demonstrate the common aspects of party switching across countries and systems, even though no two chapters address precisely the

18


same aspect of the phenomenon and its consequences. The shared foundation, laid out by Heller and Mershon in this chapter and the next, begins with the implications of switching, a definition of the phenomenon, and a survey of its incidence. The discussion culminates in the next chapter, as we set up what is in principle a multistage game between party leaders, party rank and file, and voters. The game, which is complex and probably intractable in its general expression, suggests the different and sometimes conflicting goals of political actors. The remaining chapters in this volume investigate how political actors pursue these varying goals in different contexts. Part two of the book, “Party Switching and Representation,” focuses on how party switching both affects and reflects voters’ indirect influence over policy. In this vein, Norman Schofield examines party switchers’ motivations by leveraging the general observation that party positions tend to be heterogeneous in policy space. Schofield not only explores an integrated theory of party strategy but also uses examples of party switching in the Israeli Knesset and from US politics to demonstrate that party systems can be stable as long as party positions are insensitive to switching. Schofield further identifies conditions for switching: under PR rules, a party leader with high valence may switch so as to adopt centrist policies; and under plurality rules, the conflicting demands of activist groups may lead politicians to switch party. For party positions to be insensitive to switching, parties must in some sense be immune to influence from new members who might want to rearrange party priorities or goals. Switchers, in other words, have to adapt to the positions of their new parties, and not vice versa. In separate chapters focusing on the United States and Brazil, Timothy Nokken and Scott Desposato show that switchers do indeed change their behavior to fit the positions of their new parties. For the US Congress, previous analyses (Nokken 2000; Nokken and Poole 2004) had found that switchers change their behavior at times of high ideological polarization. In “Party Switching and the Procedural Party Agenda in the US House of Representatives,” Nokken focuses on procedural votes, which are less publicly visible than final passage votes on bills, but arguably equally or more important for policy outcomes, to show that party switchers consistently toe their new party’s line in procedural and amendment votes, even when they evince relatively little change of behavior in final passage votes. Along the same lines, Scott Desposato demonstrates in “Party Switching in Brazil: Causes, Effects, and Representation” that party switchers in Brazil alter their

Introduction

19

behavior to align themselves with their new parties. Desposato’s argument, presented in two distinct steps, turns on parties’ ability to control the flow to their members of the benefits of membership in the legislature, including but not limited to policy outcomes as well as ballot access for reelection. To the extent that they control resources important to legislators, parties can make themselves more or less attractive to a potential switcher, depending on the switcher’s contribution to the party and its existing members. It follows straightforwardly that parties that can manipulate the incentive to switch also can manipulate individuals’ incentives to toe the party line in legislative voting. Taken together, Nokken and Desposato’s results lend strong support to Schofield’s key condition for a structurally stable party equilibrium. Hence, switching might not threaten representation as long as voters condition their ballots on choice of parties, not of individual candidates who then could change both party and position. The chapters in the third part, “Party Switching, Party Competition, and Policy Making,” examine how party switching affects and is affected by interparty competition. In their investigation of switching among party groups in the EP, Gail McElroy and Kenneth Benoit explore the relationships among the officially designated party groups in the EP, national parties, and the incentives of individual Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Drawing on original datasets of party group affiliations in the EP at the level of both national parties and individual MEPs, McElroy and Benoit isolate ideology and party policy as the central influences on choices of EP group affiliation. In the next chapter, William Heller and Carol Mershon use party switchers’ movements to gain analytical leverage on the determinants of party positioning. They show, using roll-call data from the Italian parliament, that party positions are sensitive to party switching, but in a one-sided manner. Starting with the notion that party positions ought to reflect the preferences of their members, Heller and Mershon find that party positions change when old members switch out, but not when new members switch in. They conclude that outswitchers probably often defect under pressure, and that their exits allow their now-former parties to adjust their positions in ways that they could not have otherwise. Inswitching, by contrast, appears to have no effect on party positions, a finding that marches with those of Nokken and Desposato’s findings, just described. The final chapter in this section, Carol Mershon and Olga Shvetsova’s “Timing Matters: Incentives for Party Switching and Stages of

20


Parliamentary Cycles,” emphasizes party affiliation as a question of strategic choice that recurs throughout the legislative term. Analyzing Italy, Romania, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States, Mershon and Shvetsova identify heightened switching for office benefits, policy advantage, and vote seeking at distinctive moments in the parliamentary cycle. The emergence of this fundamental commonality across the five different systems—alongside important contrasts— supports the notion that the timing of a legislator’s switch reveals the predominant motivation for the switch. The final section of the volume, “Party Switching and the Dynamics of Party Systems,” treats the possibility that party switching can change parties’ legislative weights and, consequently, entire legislative party systems. The first chapter in this section, Junko Kato and Kentaro Yamamoto’s “Competition for Power: Party Switching and Party System Change in Japan,” focuses on the institutional context of party switching. Where legislative institutions create seat-share thresholds for party influence, switchers can push a party to increased influence (or, when they are outswitchers, to reduced influence); a party that is close to such a threshold has a strong incentive to seek to attract inswitchers, thereby increasing its overall legislative influence. Kato and Yamamoto distinguish between a majority capable of passing bills in the plenary and one that holds enough seats to control the legislative agenda, particularly in committees. In their chapter on “Party Switching, Party Systems, and Political Representation,” Marcus Kreuzer and Vello Pettai argue that the degree of party system institutionalization shapes the frequency, forms, and consequences of party switching. To build their argument, they consider different kinds of party switching behaviors, from individual party hopping, party fissions, and party fusions to the creation of completely new parties. By comparing a broad array of party systems, from transitional to overinstitutionalized and uncompetitive, Kreuzer and Pettai emphasize party switching as an important and understudied mechanism for political change. Party switching by sitting legislators presents an empirical curiosity and a theoretical opportunity. It seems odd on its face that a politician whose career and successes are tied up in a single party might consider abandoning that party for another. It is thus all too easy to view party switching as symptomatic of special circumstances, as for instance in new democracies (e.g., Àgh 1999; Grofman, Mikkel, and Taagepera 2000; Mainwaring 1999), in party systems that are relatively unconsolidated or undergoing some upheaval (Castle and

Introduction

21

Fett 2000; Mejía Acosta 1999; Reed and Scheiner 2003; Turan 1985), or where parties are relatively weak (as in the United States; see Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart 2001; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001; Nokken 2000). As the contributions to this volume show, studying party switching yields far more than an understanding of who switches and why: It allows us to analyze parties and party systems, as well as policy making, in terms of interdependent, individual decisions. The next chapter takes up the task of modeling interdependent individual decisions as structured by institutions.

1.6

Notes

1. The Belgian case illustrates a possibility more complex than policy “drift.” If a few political entrepreneurs activate an additional dimension of conflict, and virtually all parties move to define positions in the new policy space, legislators can switch in the effort to serve faithfully their constituencies (e.g., Dewachter 1987). For a formal analysis of the activation of suppressed dimensions, with illustrations from the United States, see Miller and Schofield (2003; they touch on switching as well, 256; 2008; Schofield 2006; Schofield and Sened 2006; and cf. Schofield’s chapter in this volume). 2. The effective number of parliamentary parties is a widely used measure that takes into account both the raw number and the seat strength of legislative parties (e.g., Cox 1997; Ordeshook and Shvetsova 1994). 3. Start-up parties are distinct from parties created by fission because they draw legislators from multiple parties; they are distinct from fusion because the parties that lose members do not disappear. 4. For a cross-national comparison of switching, see Chang (2006). Mershon and Shvetsova (2008b) analyze more than 3,800 observations from 9 countries. 5. Crewe and King identify potential recruits on the basis of several sources: a key vote in the Commons (October 1971 on what was then the European Economic Community, EEC), interviews, signed support for reforms of party structure (in September 1980), and press reports. 6. Americanists do refer to different party systems in the United States (see Key 1964; Sundquist 1983), but not in the same sense that students of comparative politics define them.

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Introduction

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at the meeting of the Research Work Group on Legislative Party Switching, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Keesings Contemporary Archives. 1957. Bristol: Longman. Key, V. O. 1964. Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Kohno, Masuru. 1997. Japan’s Postwar Party Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Krehbiel, Keith. 1991. Information and Legislative Organization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lalvani, Mala. 2005. “Coalition Governments: Fiscal Implication for the Indian Economy.” American Review of Political Economy 3 (1): 127–163. Laver, Michael. 1998. “Models of Government Formation.” Annual Review of Political Science 1: 1–25. Laver, Michael, and Kenneth Benoit. 2003. “The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections.” American Journal of Political Science 47 (2, April): 215–233. Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. 1990. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Left Socialist Party, Denmark. 1997. “Documents and History.” English version last updated December 3, 1997. http://www.venstresocialisterne.dk/uk_index. htm. Last accessed June 27, 2007. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. 1967. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. New York: Free Press. MacRae, Duncan. 1967. Parliament, Parties, and Society in France 1946–1958. New York: St. Martin’s. Mainwaring, Scott P. 1999. Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mainwaring, Scott P., and Aníbal Pérez Liñán. 1997. “Party Discipline in the Brazilian Constitutional Congress.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 22 (4): 453–483. Mainwaring, Scott P., and Mariano Torcal. 2005. “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization.” Unpublished paper, Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame. Mair, Peter, and Michael Marsh. 2004. “Political Parties in Electoral Markets in Postwar Ireland.” In Political Parties and Electoral Change, ed. Peter Mair, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Fritz. Plasser. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Martin, Lanny, and Georg Vanberg. 2004. “Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny.” American Journal of Political Science 48 (1, December): 13–27. ———. 2005. “Coalition Policymaking and Legislative Review.” American Political Science Review 99 (1): 73–106. McCarty, Nolan M., Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. 2001. “The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress.” American Political Science Review 95 (3): 673–687. McElroy, Gail M. 2003. “Party Switching in the European Parliament: Why Bother?” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 3–6.

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Mejía Acosta, Andrés. 1999. “Indisciplina y deslealtad en el congreso ecuatoriano.” Iconos (6, January): 13–21. Mershon, Carol. 2001. “Contending Models of Portfolio Allocation and Office Payoffs to Party Factions: Italy, 1963–79.” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2, April): 277–293. ———. 2002. The Costs of Coalition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. “Legislative Party Switching and Executive Coalitions.” Unpublished paper, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Mershon, Carol, and Olga Shvetsova. 2005. “Electoral Cycles and Party Switching: Opportunistic Partisan Realignment in Legislatures.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 6–10. ———. 2007. “Institutional Determinants of Party System Change and Party Volatility in Legislatures.” Unpublished paper, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. ———. 2008a. “Parliamentary Cycles and Party Switching in Legislatures.” Comparative Political Studies 41 (1): 99–127. ———. 2008b. “Party Switching in Sitting Parliaments and the Midterm Effect.” Paper presented at Annual Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research, Rennes, France. Mershon, Carol, and Timothy P. Nokken. 2008. “Party Formation and Changes of Party Affiliation among Legislators: The United States and Great Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 3–6. Miller, Gary, and Norman Schofield. 2003. “Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States.” American Political Science Review 97 (2): 245–260. ———. 2008. “The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the US.” Perspectives on Politics 6 (3): 433–450. Miskin, Sarah. 2003. “Politician Overboard: Jumping the Party Ship.” Unpublished paper, Parliament of Australia: Parliamentary Library—Politics and Public Administration Group. Moe, Terry M., and Michael Caldwell. 1994. “The Institutional Foundations of Democratic Government: A Comparison of Presidential and Parliamentary Systems.” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 150 (1): 171–195. Müller, Wolfgang C., and Kaare Strøm, eds. 1999. Policy, Office, or Votes: How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nokken, Timothy P. 2000. “Dynamics of Congressional Loyalty: Party Defection and Roll Call Behavior, 1947–1997.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 25 (3): 414–444. Nokken, Timothy P., and Keith T. Poole. 2004. “Congressional Party Defection in American History.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 29 (4): 545–568. Ordeshook, Peter C., and Olga V. Shvetsova. 1994. “Ethnic Heterogeneity, District Magnitude, and the Number of Parties.” American Journal of Political Science 38 (1, February): 100–123.

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Powell, G. Bingham, Jr. 2000. Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Przeworski, Adam, Susan C. Stokes, and Bernard Manin, eds. 1999. Democracy, Accountability, and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reed, Steven R., and Ethan Scheiner. 2003. “Electoral Incentives and Policy Preferences: Mixed Motives behind Party Defections in Japan.” British Journal of Political Science 33 (3): 469–490. Riker, William H. 1982. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science.” American Political Science Review 76 (4): 753–766. Sánchez de Dios, Manuel. 1999. “Parliamentary Party Discipline in Spain.” In Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, ed. Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz, 141–162. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Santero, F. Javier. 1998. “Pacto de los partidos contra el transfuguismo en los ayuntamientos.” El Mundo July 8. http://www.elmundo.es/1998/07/08/ espana/08N0026.html. Last accessed July 29, 2008. Schattschneider, E. E. 1942. Party Government. New York: Rinehart. Schindler, Peter. 1999. Datenhandbuch zur Geschichte des Deutschen Bundestages 1949 bis 1999. Band I. Berlin: Deutscher Bundestag. Schmitt, Rogério. 1999. “Migração partidária e reeleição na Câmara dos Deputados.” Novos Estudos CEBRAP 54 (July): 127–146. Schofield, Norman. 2006. Architects of Political Change: Constitutional Quandaries and Social Choice Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schofield, Norman, and Michael Laver. 1985. “Bargaining Theory and Portfolio Payoffs in European Coalition Governments, 1945–83.” British Journal of Political Science 15 (2): 143–164. Schofield, Norman, and Itai Sened. 2006. Multiparty Democracy: Parties, Elections and Legislative Politics in Multiparty Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. South Africa, Parliament of the Republic. 2008. “State of Parties in the NA.” http:// www.parliament.gov.za/live/content.php?Category_ID=148. Last accessed July 29, 2008. Stokes, Susan C. 1999. “Political Parties and Democracy.” Annual Review of Political Science 2: 243–267. Strøm, Kaare. 1990. “A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties.” American Journal of Political Science 34 (2, May): 565–598. Sundquist, James L. 1983. Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Thames, Frank C. 2005. “Parliamentary Party Switching in the Ukrainian Rada, 1998–2002.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.

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Tomás Mallén, Beatriz. 2002. Transfuguismo parlamentario y democracia de partidos. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Tsebelis, George, and Jeannette Money. 1997. Bicameralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turan, Ilter. 1985. “Changing Horses in Midstream: Party Changers in the Turkish National Assembly.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 10 (1): 21–34. Waltz, Kenneth N. 1990. “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities.” American Political Science Review 84 (3, September): 731–745. White, Stephen, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister. 1997. How Russia Votes. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. Yoshinaka, Antoine. 2005. “House Party Switchers and Committee Assignments: ‘Who Gets What, When, and How?’ ” Legislative Studies Quarterly 30 (3): 391–406. Zielinski, Jakub, Kazimierz M. Slomczynski, and Goldie Shabad. 2005. “Electoral Control in New Democracies: The Perverse Incentives of Fluid Party Systems.” World Politics 57 (3): 365–395.

2 Integrating Theoretical and Empirical Models of Party Switching William B. Heller and Carol Mershon

2.1 Introduction Party switching is a relatively common yet little studied phenomenon. Observers have remarked on the presence of switching in various circumstances and settings, but with a very few exceptions (Aldrich and Bianco 1992; Desposato 2006; Heller and Mershon 2005; 2008; Laver and Benoit 2003) scholars have not seen party switching as theoretically interesting. They have instead treated party switching as an idiosyncratic phenomenon, entirely dependent on context, and essentially sui generis in each occurrence. The contributions to this volume represent an attempt to address what we see as a gap between extant empirical accounts of switching and the substantial leverage that a theoretically driven approach to switching can provide. Taken together, the chapters examine the contexts, causes, and consequences of party switching. Although most of the chapters focus on one or a few country cases, and each chapter examines only a piece of a larger set of strategic interactions in which switching occurs, each does so in explicitly theoretical terms. We indicated in the introduction that party switching takes place in the context of strategic interaction between individual members of parliament (MPs) and the leaders of the MPs’ parties and of other parties. The decisions that these actors make reflect their interaction and also a larger context that includes the legislative party system, on one hand, and voters, on the other. In this chapter, we lay out a theoretical framework for analyzing party switching that permits isolation of the separate elements and consequences of the strategic interactions entailed in party switching, with a clear focus on individual decisions, while placing those decisions explicitly in their larger

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context. We do not construct a fully specified, overarching switching game. Rather, we present the framework of a four-stage game—only two stages of which involve strategic interaction—as a foundation for examining switching in specific cases and environments. Building on this foundation, the chapters that follow contribute, individually and in the aggregate, to a general understanding of the causes and consequences of party switching. Our sketch of a switching game, along with the pieces of it fleshed out by the other chapters in this volume, suggests a potential for carrying the study of party switching even farther than we and our colleagues do here. One intriguing possibility, for example, is that legislative party switching should come in cascades, as every switch both provides new information about (cf. Heller and Mershon 2005) and alters the legislative environment. Such changes could in turn induce at least some legislators who previously had not considered switching to reevaluate their positions. To the extent that such reevaluation leads to more switches, it is easy to imagine circumstances where just a few initial switches could trigger many more. The result should be cascades of switching. Although an in-depth examination of the possibility of cascades lies beyond the scope of this book, in the conclusions we briefly discuss how they might occur and what sorts of impacts they might have. To construct a game-theoretic framework for legislative party switching, we must first identify the bases for our inquiry. In the next section, we concentrate on the key assumptions undergirding both this volume and the project out of which it grew. The most important of these is that legislator behavior, for those who switch and those who do not, is motivated by ambition. In the third section, we lay out the pieces and logic of our four-stage switching game. We then highlight several of the questions that the game brings to the fore, and that the contributors to this volume explore in greater detail. We end this chapter with some brief observations about the analytical purchase afforded by submitting party switching on the part of elected politicians to rigorous analysis.

2.2 Precursors to Theory Party switching is fundamentally an individual phenomenon, as the introduction indicated. Even when legislators move en masse from one party to another, or to form a new party, each legislator’s move generally is the product of an individual choice.1 The study of party

Theoretical and Empirical Models

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switching thus imposes a basic theoretical perspective, grounded in a focus on individual behaviors, strategies, and choices. This perspective entails two underpinning assumptions. First, individual politicians seek to achieve their personal goals and desires, and their behavior is motivated by ambition directed at achieving them. Second, party switching is a tool that individual legislators can use as they seek to achieve their own ambitions. The ability to move from one party to another is not unconstrained, of course—a MP cannot move into a party that will not accept him or her, for example—but it does give MPs the possibility of improving their lot by changing their party affiliation.

2.2.1

Individuals and their choices

We begin with individual choices, as we must if we are to model legislators’ decisions to change their party affiliations. Our focus expands rapidly beyond the individual making the choice, however, as both the decision to switch and the alternatives available to a would-be switcher depend heavily on context. An individual’s choice, after all, depends on the set of feasible alternatives to doing nothing—and, in some cases (e.g., for an MP at risk of expulsion from his or her party), doing nothing is itself not a feasible alternative. In the introduction, we observed that party switching seems odd in light of parties’ importance to legislators.2 The first question to ask, therefore, is: why would a sitting legislator want to change his or her party affiliation? To answer this adequately, we need to know not only how they are faring in their current party, but also what alternatives are open to them and how they could expect to fare in each of those. We need, in other words, to ask where a would-be switcher would go. The answer depends on other parties. Thus, we need to know whether other parties will accept switchers and, if so, why—that is, what would they have to gain from accepting defectors from other parties? A party’s willingness to accept new members depends on a number of factors, not least of which is its position in the legislative party system. On one hand, the legislative party system matters because it defines the bargaining context for policy making, agenda control, and, in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems, government formation. On the other hand, the party system matters because it defines the range of options available to voters at election time and, hence, it provides the parameters, in combination with the electoral

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system, that define any given legislator’s probability of reelection. Further, the institutionalization of parties and the party system might play an important role in determining how any given MP views the attractiveness of membership in any given party as well as the costs of switching from one party to another. A key, unanswered question in this regard, however, is whether relatively low levels of party and party system institutionalization lead to higher levels of party switching, or whether, inversely, frequent party switching retards or even reverses such institutionalization (for discussion of this issue, see Kreuzer and Pettai this volume). Switching is motivated by and occurs in the context of these factors. They in turn are dynamic, and every switch can in principle change them. If larger parties are generically more attractive than smaller ones, for example, then every time one MP switches all other MPs implicitly have to reevaluate their own prospects. Every move by an MP changes the legislative weight of at least one party (though compensating moves might change weights back). More subtly, every move by an MP is likely to change the observed ideal point of at least one party (see Heller and Mershon in chapter 7 here), hence altering its attractiveness both to other potential switchers and to its remaining members. We stress, in other words, the interdependence of decisions to switch and of switches themselves (cf. Aldrich and Bianco 1992). A related and more general point is that whether and when an MP switches is in large part a consequence of the information available to her. Information about voter preferences (e.g., from subnational election results) might motivate an MP to reevaluate his or her expectations about party vote shares in the next parliamentary elections (and thus postelection seat shares), for example. If MPs have information about their counterparts’ or colleagues’ plans to switch parties—through rumor, inference, or straightforward announcement—shared expectations of moves could lead to simultaneous or near-simultaneous jumps by several legislators, either as a group or in some kind of interparty shuffle. Party repositioning, whether calculated or incidental to switches or some other occurrence, can move parties’ observed policy preferences relative to the ideal points of potential switchers. Or observed moves by well-known or otherwise powerful politicians might change an MP’s priors about how attractive parties are for voters as well as for MPs interested in legislative influence. Note that a group of ideologically compatible MPs might see forming a new party as an attractive option, particularly if they believe that voters


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are looking for a change, or that a new party could induce still other MPs to switch into it. This line of reasoning suggests that switching cascades are indeed likely, as noted earlier. Clearly, the possibility of switching means that what has commonly been considered static is not. Switching introduces a dynamic to legislative politics and to party politics more broadly, a dynamic that is progressive and might not permit an equilibrium. Every time an MP changes party affiliation, there is a reallocation—often subtle, but not necessarily so—of bargaining power across parties and even across individual MPs. This reallocation changes the bargaining context, wherein rank-and-file MPs and party leaders alike reevaluate their situations and their options (cf., Filippov, Ordeshook, and Shvetsova 2004). Moreover, as Mershon and Shvetsova point out in chapter 8 (see also Mershon and Shvetsova 2008), the incentives facing sitting MPs are themselves dynamic over the life of a legislature, so at some level MPs have to reevaluate their situations even in the absence of visible changes in the party system.

2.2.2 Ambition We hold as a strong maintained hypothesis the notion that politicians of all stripes are motivated by the desire to gain or retain office. The logic underpinning this claim, so ubiquitous in political science that it might be held as a law of politics, is based on the assumption that politicians seek office to achieve things that they could not achieve—or could not achieve to equal effect—out of office. The goal could be anything, including but probably not limited to a yen for public service, a drive for power, a vision of “good” public policy, or a profitable career. The key is that these are goals best achieved in office and, in some cases, unattainable out of office.3 A politician’s desire to gain and hold office is, in short, a simple consequence of what she seeks to achieve. It is at once both product and tool of, in a word, ambition. Even the MP who seeks only to hold a simple, unremarkable legislative seat, we suspect, does so not because he or she wants the seat per se, but rather it is the most attractive career option open to him or her. As we see it, where there are goals, there is ambition—that is, the drive to attain, or at least to seek to attain, those goals. From this perspective, choices to change party affiliation are decisions about how best to realize ambitions (or, less propitiously, how best to avoid seeing goals thwarted and ambitions dashed).

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One of our basic premises is that politicians, legislators included, are ambitious. Their ambitions are personal, and while they might overlap with and be served by the ambitions of their party leaders and other copartisans, it would be a mistake to equate an MP’s goals with those of his or her party. We assume as well that individuals have basic preferences over outcomes in both policy and politics.4 Individuals can act strategically to achieve the best possible feasible outcome,5 but they also pay a cost for acting against their raw (i.e., untinged by strategic or practical considerations) preferences. That is, acting strategically is on one hand psychologically or intellectually more difficult—hence, more costly—than acting naively. On the other hand, to the extent that an MP is beholden to an audience of voters who does not appreciate the complexities of strategic decision making, strategic choices might appear to represent an abandonment of basic principles or interests, for which the unsophisticated audience might impose punishment. (As Nokken suggests in this volume, legislative procedures such as those in the US Congress might allow politicians to behave strategically while appearing to be both consistent and sincere.)

2.2.3 Party unity In the quest to realize their ambitions, MPs (and their parties and party leaders) face tradeoffs. Primary among these is the tension between party unity and each individual’s desire to vote against the party line, whether because his or her goals conflict with those of the party on some issue, or because the desire to vote according to his or her raw preferences is particularly strong. For MPs whose goals are close to each other and to those of their party leaders, instances of conflict should be relatively few; for MPs farther from the center of the party, they should be more common. Because policy making is multidimensional, however, and a party’s policy positions to some extent represent an aggregation of its members’ policy preferences (see Heller and Mershon this volume, chapter 7), it is unlikely that any one legislator would agree with the party on all issues. Consequently, maintaining party unity might be difficult. Party unity is important because party labels are important. Party labels give voters information-laden cues about candidates (Snyder and Ting 2002), but the amount of information they can transmit depends in part on party unity. When a candidate bears the label of a given party, the label tells voters how the candidate is likely to vote


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across a wide range of issues; the more unified are members of the party in legislative voting, the clearer is the information conveyed. A voter who cares about party programs might want to vote for the candidate or party whose program he or she likes best, for example.6 To the extent that party programs are unclear, so that the party label imparts little information, voters will have a hard time choosing among them. In essence, the less meaningful party labels are, the more voters who care only about programs must vote either by coin flip or not at all. Parties can uphold unity in three ways: negative agenda control, cohesion, and discipline. Negative agenda control—the party leadership’s ability to keep unwanted bills off the legislative calendar—is effective, albeit hard to observe. In the US House, for example, Rohde (1991; see also, Campbell, Cox, and McCubbins 2001; Cox and McCubbins 2001; 2005) suggests that the majority party seeks to ensure that the House never considers issues that would split the party. Party cohesion jibes with the idea of a party as a group of like-minded individuals joined for a common purpose (e.g., Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999; Krehbiel 1993; Rasch 1999). Even like-minded individuals disagree from time to time, however, and some purposes are more common than others. When cohesion fails, unity can be maintained through party discipline, which imposes costs on MPs who fail to toe the party line. Party leaders control an array of disciplinary tools, including but not limited to ballot access (or the right to use the party label; Cox and McCubbins 1994), committee positions (D’Onofrio 1979; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991), advancement within the party and, by extension, increased influence over party policy positions and access to perks of legislative office (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999). Inasmuch as party labels are important (which in turn depends on how voters view candidates; see Cox 1987; 1997), the ideal situation for an individual MP is to be in a highly unified party that does not constrain his or her own voting behavior. Accepting the premise that all members of a party are likely to take exception to the party’s chosen position on some issues at least some of the time, this means that every MP would like to be able to vote against the party position, without consequences, even as all his or her copartisans toe the party line. This is of course the basis for a fundamental collective dilemma and is generally untenable. On any given vote, each MP’s incentives to deviate from the party line depend on institutions as well as her personal preferences. Institutions influence how much voters care about individual MPs

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(as opposed to parties) and their voting habits—and, as a result, how keenly individual MPs feel the need to stick to certain positions that might bring them into conflict with their party. And institutions are central to leaders’ ability to punish members of their rank and file who buck the party. Rules that make party switching relatively difficult, as for example in Spain (Mershon and Heller 2003; Sánchez de Dios 1999) can make party switching less common than it might otherwise be, though as Miskin (2003) points out, such rules do not necessarily fulfill their intended normative objectives. Rules that allow party leaders to determine who gets on the ballot and who does not— and where on the party list a candidate lies—give party leaders overweening power to determine MPs’ political careers (Gallagher and Marsh 1988). The wider the array of tools available to party leaders for disciplining their rank and file, in general, the fewer incentives individual MPs have to buck their party line (because it is likely to be more costly in the end). At the end of the day, discipline is the credible threat of punishment. It works when party leaders can block or at least hamper the pursuit of one or more of the aims routinely attributed to legislators: policy, office (e.g., a cabinet post) and legislative perks, and reelection (Müller and Strøm 1999; Strøm 1990). The tools of discipline derive from the party’s control over necessary steps along the paths of MPs’ ambition. Leaders’ ability and willingness to impose discipline on their party rank and file are fundamental for party unity. The more MPs find themselves forced either to vote against their preference (whether strategic or naïve), however, the more they are likely to resent the constraints of discipline. The greater their resentment, the greater their incentive to search for and take advantage of alternatives that offer a better net benefit.

2.2.4

The link between ambition and discipline

From this vantage point, it becomes clear that ambition and discipline are closely linked, and that in combination they play strongly into an MP’s consideration of the possibility of changing party affiliation. Other scholars have honed in on the importance for switching of ambition: McElroy’s (2003) analysis is explicitly ambition theoretic, for instance, and Desposato’s (2006) assessment of the impact of electoral, institutional, ideological, and patronage concerns on legislators’ propensity to change parties hinges on legislator ambition. Desposato finds, consistent with Aldrich and Bianco (1992), that


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switchers aim to enhance their prospects both for reelection and legislative influence. Other studies suggest ambition as the driving force behind switching. Turan (1985, 32), for instance, finds that switchers in Turkey seem to serve longer in the legislature and to “accomplish other goals,” while Sánchez de Dios (1999; see also, Àgh 1999; Tomás Mallén 2002) views switching as a means of jockeying for position and political influence. Studies that show that legislators who change parties also change the way they vote (e.g., Ansolabehere, Synder, and Stewart 2001; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001; Nokken 2000) implicitly consider ambition, since party-induced changes in voting behavior likely are linked to party discipline, and discipline works because legislators are ambitious. Ambition is a quality possessed by individuals. Discipline is a threat wielded by party leaders who possess the wherewithal to thwart individual MPs’ ambitions. Individual politicians’ ambitions turn on holding on to office, influencing policy making, and advancing their political careers (on the primacy of these goals, see Müller and Strøm 1999; Strøm 1990). Party leaders, for their part, seek to maximize the integrity of the party label, party influence on coalition formation, and party influence in policy formation; and they use discipline to attain those ends. Leaders’ goals, which are to some extent incompatible—involvement in coalition bargaining implies accepting close identification with other parties, for instance, which erodes the integrity and uniqueness of the party label—converge with leaders’ personal desires, which match those of any other MP but are easier to realize in the leadership than in the party rank and file (see Cox and McCubbins 1993, Ch. 9). Taking discipline and ambition together, analysis is in principle straightforward. Leaders simply need to impose enough discipline to generate strong party unity; their only constraint is the costs of monitoring their party’s members and expending whatever resources are required to exact punishment. In equilibrium, if leaders calculate correctly, we should see MPs defecting from the party line only very rarely, and only when they gain more from defecting than they lose under the lash of discipline. The possibility that an MP might move to another party adds a new dimension of complexity: absent the possibility of switching, MPs and their leaders engage in simple cost-benefit analyses; if switching is possible, their analyses become strategic. A leader has to ask himself or herself whether a given level of discipline will induce some members to leave the party, and if so what consequences that will have for achieving their party’s goals;

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an MP might consider or appear to consider switching in the face of harsh discipline at least in part in an effort to convince his or her leaders to make discipline less onerous. Ultimately, the greater the role of discipline in determining MP behavior, the net benefits an MP realizes (i.e., considering the costs he or she pays) from membership in a party, the less attractive is that party to him or her. The lower the attractiveness of the party, the greater the probability not only of voting against the party line but also of abandoning the party altogether (cf. Heller and Mershon 2008). Party switching thus arises at least in part out of the interaction of leaders and rank-and-file MPs. We now turn to characterize that interaction as a game.

2.3

The Legislative Switching Game

As strategic interaction between potential switchers and their party leaders, party switching occurs in a legislative context defined by the legislative party system, on one hand, and, on the other hand, an electoral context. Voters look at politicians and parties and legislative outcomes as they choose how to vote (strategically or naively), and the results at the polls then feed back into the legislative party system. The legislative party system in turn sets the stage for strategic interaction between potential switchers and party leaders. And so on: one round of stages forms the foundation for the next. The key is that party switching is one of the tools available to legislators who want to maximize their political fortunes, their political influence, and their ability to achieve their policy goals. Legislators choose to switch in reaction to decisions made by party leaders and in anticipation of voters’ behavior the next time they go to the polls. In this light, we portray legislative switching as part of a four-stage game, as shown in Figure 2.1. In the first stage, Nature exogenously and unstrategically sets the key parameters of the game (cf. Laver and Benoit 2003) by choosing a legislative party system. Strategic behavior begins at the second stage, when parties (more accurately, party leaders) choose a level of discipline to impose on their members. The level of discipline, along with party ideology and legislative bargaining weight, is a key element of a party’s attractiveness to potential switchers. The parties’ choices at the second stage in effect are designed to condition switching decisions in the third stage. The legislator’s decision is at heart a simple one, but it is complicated by multiple and sometimes conflicting electoral, office (or career), and policy

Theoretical and Empirical Models Nature chooses legislative party system * number of parties * party weights (seat shares) * party ideologies 1

Legislators choose to switch or not to maximize * probability reelection * policy goals * career goals 3

Party leaders set discipline to maximize * integrity of party label * influence in coalition negotiations * influence in policy formation 2 Figure 2.1

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Voters vote to minimize distance between own ideal points and expected policy outcomes 4

The four stages of the switching game.

goals. These objectives are facets of political ambition, which drives politicians of all stripes, whether party leaders or faces in the legislative crowd, to use whatever tools are available to them to further their own interests. It is thus ambition that drives both parties’ decisions on discipline and legislators’ decisions on party affiliation. Voters enter the game at the final stage. Concerned only about policy outcomes, they vote on the basis of their perceptions of parties’ policy preferences and legislative bargaining weights.7 They are sophisticated in the sense that they implicitly consider how their votes affect each party’s input in policy making (i.e., the politics of legislative coalitions, which we do not model here). As players in the final stage of the switching game, however, voters register their sincere preferences, given expectations about each party’s influence and the value of their own votes. We present this sequence as a framework, rather than as fully specified game. In the manner of game-theoretic analysis in search of subgame-perfect equilibria, however, we begin at the end and work backward. We assume that the players in the game have perfect information, and that each player’s ideal point is common knowledge (and does not change). The usual spatial-modeling assumptions apply.

2.3.1 Stage four: Voters decide At the end of the day, it is voters who decide how parties and their candidates fare at the polls. We assume that voters care most strongly

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about policy outcomes. (As a practical matter, we suspect that even voters who evince a strong preference for types or qualities of process—e.g., “fairness” or “democracy”—would do so only as long as decision-making processes yield outcomes that do not consistently damage their interests.) How a voter decides—for example, whether he or she simply votes naively for the party whose ideal point is closest to her own, or backs the party he or she believes most likely to move policy outcomes closer to his or her own ideal point—is beyond the scope of this project. In any case, if party switching affects party positions as well as their seat shares, voter decisions should take switching into account.8

2.3.2 Stage three: Legislators decide Whether legislators decide to switch parties depends fundamentally on what they want to achieve. Scholars generally agree that parties want some combination of votes, office, and policy (Strøm 1990; Müller and Strøm 1999; and see in particular Strøm 1994). Parties are not qua parties reasoning entities, and while for some analytical purposes it might make sense to assume that they are (as in the field of coalition studies, cf. Laver and Schofield 1990), this is not the case here. Parties ultimately are vehicles for their members, and it is vital to keep in mind that those members, not the parties themselves, want to win votes, occupy office, and make policy (Aldrich 1995; McDonald 2004, 14). To analyze legislators’ party-affiliation choices, we begin with the assumption that legislators (and politicians in general) are ambitious, as already emphasized. Ambition dictates that they seek the means to their desired ends that yields the highest expected benefit; and they have chosen political careers because they can best realize their goals in the political arena. The reelection imperative so often attributed to politicians follows directly from this assumption. We can only conjecture about the goals that political ambition serves, but two possibilities stand out: power (for its own sake or the sake of the perks of office) and policy. Both lead politicians to seek increasing policy influence and, we believe, motivate sitting legislators’ choices of party affiliation. A sitting legislator’s decision whether to change his or her partyaffiliation status unfolds in a process similar to economic models of job searches. Where job search models focus on monetary remuneration, however, we highlight the expected utility of choice of


41

party affiliation, where rewards come in the currency of power and policy. Analysis is complicated by several factors, of which we flag two: 1. the legislator in question’s state before taking action (i.e., a legislator can be in some party or, possibly, in no party9); and 2. the possible range of alternatives available to a legislator, which might be limited by rule-bound constraints on switching or formation of legislative party groups. Those alternatives include a. staying put; b. switching to a different, established party; c. switching to or participating in the formation of a new party; d. switching to independent status (if not independent already); and e. exiting the legislature, whether to pursue new options outside politics or to continue a political career in a different capacity, for example, to take subnational or supranational office.

As noted earlier, the legislator’s objective function consists of three components, each playing on different aspects of ambition. The first and most basic is votes or, more accurately, continuance in the legislature. This depends on two things: nomination (including list position for party-list ballots), controlled by local or national party leaders or party activists, and party electoral strength, which we take as (expected) vote share. The second is offices controlled by the legislature, for which it is best to belong to a party in the legislative majority or with a good chance of getting into the legislative majority. The third is policy. Policy considerations are complicated by several factors, including 1. The need to be part of a majority coalition to make policy, which makes party membership attractive and party unity desirable (Laver and Shepsle 1999; see also, Cox 1987). We assume, in line with these observations, that membership in a large party is more desirable than membership in a small party, all else constant. 2. The likelihood that a legislator’s personal policy preferences will diverge somewhat from those supported by his or her party, which suggests a. Legislators sometimes would like to vote against their parties. b. Notwithstanding the desire to break ranks with his or her party, each legislator should value party unity as a collective good for members of the party; that is, membership in a party with relatively high observed unity should be more valuable than membership in a party with less observed unity, all else equal.

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William B. Heller and Carol Mershon 3. A legislator who is a member of a party is better able than a legislator not in the party to move that party’s observed ideal point toward his or her own. Even so: a. A party’s ability to influence policy outcomes and a legislator’s likely ability to influence the party’s observed preferences are independent (or perhaps inversely related). b. There might well be tradeoffs between a legislator’s ability to influence policy outcomes (as a member of an influential party) or enjoy enhanced career opportunities and his or her desire to be in a party whose members’ policy preferences converge with his or her own (McDonald 2004, 14).

A legislator’s calculation of the value of staying where he or she is, whether as a party member or a lone independent, depends on how he or she evaluates his or her own situation and the available alternatives to it. The criteria for evaluating options depend on both long- and short-term concerns. In the long term, legislators care about positioning themselves for reelection and so worry about both their party’s chances and their chances within the party. In the short term—that is, during the legislature and between elections—legislators care about policy and office. These two considerations are inseparable much of the time: holding legislative office yields policy influence, and a legislator with policy influence (e.g., as a leading member of a party whose size or position makes it pivotal or nearly so) is an attractive candidate for office. Party unity is a collective good for party members, not least because it gives parties leverage for bargaining over policy (Laver and Shepsle 1999). It also contributes to voters’ ability to distinguish among parties, and it underpins voter confidence in the solidity of party platforms. As a collective good, however, it is likely to be undersupplied absent some mechanism—such as disciplinary threats wielded by party leaders—to motivate members to vote with their party but against their personal preferences.10 The final element of the switching calculus, therefore, is party discipline, which acts on an MP’s policy influence when party leaders can block or roll back an MP’s advancement within the party, withhold the benefits of the party label (i.e., expel the MP from the party, see, e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1994), or affect the MP’s possibilities for reelection through control over ballot access and list placement (cf. Gallagher and Marsh 1988). It is of course difficult to distinguish between behavior motivated by individual preferences and that motivated by partisan pressures (cf. Heller and Mershon 2008). Party switching offers leverage on the


43

question; Timothy Nokken and Scott Desposato, in their contributions to this volume, focus on party switchers to examine the extent (and form) of party influence on individual legislators’ behavior. The range of disciplinary instruments available to party leaders will vary by both leader and party. The range of disciplinable offenses against the party also vary by party, by party leader, and—as we will discuss in relation to party strategies in the face of potential switching—by legislator. In all cases, however, discipline keeps in line MPs who might otherwise break ranks with their party; discipline works in this way by threatening to impede their ability to realize their ambitions. Legislators face two kinds of discipline. On one hand, there is discipline designed to induce desired behavior on the part of legislators. On the other hand, there is discipline designed to ensure that the kinds of people who advance within the party are acceptable to party leaders. The former consists of punishments (or threats thereof); the latter consists of obstacles to advancement. The two types of discipline are in principle separate, though they can easily fold together, and we suspect that legislators prefer that they be closely linked.11 Behavioral discipline acts both on MPs who vote against the party and so incur high costs from discipline unleashed, and on MPs who would prefer to vote against the party but do not because of fear of discipline. Every time an MP votes contrary to his or her personal preferences he or she pays a cost in benefits foregone equivalent to the difference in his or her utilities over the alternative he or she prefers versus the alternative his or her party prefers. The elements of the legislator’s choice are varied and, in many cases, dynamic. If larger parties are generically more attractive than smaller ones, for example, then every time one MP switches all other MPs implicitly have to reevaluate their own prospects. An MP will consider changing his or her state—for example, switching into a new party, exiting the legislature, or becoming an unaffiliated legislator (legislative or constitutional rules permitting)—only when he or she expects to benefit more from moving than from staying put. If legislators can easily compare their expected utility from different states with their current one—and we believe that in the confines of a legislature they can—then searching for alternatives, like applying for a new job in some professions, should be essentially costless (Hey and McKenna 1979). Changing states, however, is not costless: first, most legislators who move risk losing some or all of their investments in resources specific to the state from which they move, resources

44


such as seniority, intraparty relationships, and constituent support; second, switchers muddy their reputations with colleagues, possible future colleagues (in or out of the legislature), and voters (Desposato 2006; Hey and McKenna 1979). The general point is that whether and when an MP switches depend on his or her expectations and hence on the information available to him or her.

2.3.3 Stage two: Parties decide All strategic play in the legislative switching game begins at the second stage, after Nature’s initial move. At the second stage, each party sets the parameters and average overall levels of discipline, that apply to its members. As noted, parties are collectivities of individual politicians. It is party members, not parties themselves, who are ambitious and who benefit when their party can influence policy and attract votes (Aldrich 1995, 4). Parties can do neither, however, if they cannot overcome the collective action problems endemic to enterprises that require distinct individuals with disparate interests to work together for their common good. For that, they have party leaders (Luebbert 1986). “Party” decisions are in actuality party leaders’ decisions. Leaders are constrained by checks in the decision-making process (Heller, Keefer, and McCubbins 1998; Strøm 2000) the need to balance keeping their rank and file reasonably happy (and so retain control of the leadership), the need to attract voters, and the need to bargain over policy with counterparts in other parties (see Cox and McCubbins 1993). They seek to maximize their own ambitions with regard to reelection, office, and policy influence; to that end, they need jointly to maximize the party’s ability to influence policy, which in turn is closely related to its ability to win votes at the next election and its observed coherence (in legislative voting and in the behavior, pronouncements, and reputations of its members). To the extent that the party succeeds in these terms, its members—and in particular its leaders—benefit. Where decision-making power lies in a party can be hard to identify. Rules might specify who holds specific agenda powers, but if such powers are “nested” in relationships defined by other sets of rules (Tsebelis 1990), including norms or tradition (Greif 2006), then the exercise of formal agenda powers is in itself strategic (cf. Heller 2001; 2007). Heller and Mershon address this issue with respect to the question of how party positions are set in chapter 7 of this volume, leveraging switching-induced changes in party composition to


45

see how the preferences of the parties’ legislative rank and file affect party policy positions. There is an added benefit to party leadership, in that leaders can use their influence in the party to move its observed ideal point closer to their own. To that end, they can seek to attract new members who move the party in the desired direction and they can apply harsh discipline (even to the point of expulsion from the party) for members who impede the party’s movement in the direction their leader wants to take it (Heller and Mershon 2008). Discipline, broadly construed as a combination of opportunities for advancement and threats of punishment, serves both these purposes. At the second stage, therefore, the party leadership has to set both behavioral and career discipline to (a) induce desired behavior, present a unified face to voters, and maintain as strong a position as possible in bargaining over policy with other legislative parties; (b) retain party members and possibly attract switchers; and (c) move the party’s observed ideal point as close as possible to the leadership ideal point. Whatever its level and however strictly it is enforced, discipline plays directly on legislators’ ambitions. The threat of punishment for failing to behave according to criteria set by party leaders motivates legislators to act in the party’s (or party leader’s) interests, even when they would rather not, to achieve longer-term career goals. For parties that are concerned with retaining members and attracting switchers as well as maintaining party unity, at least part of the decision on setting discipline is conditioned by the distribution of voter preferences and the locations and weights of other parties. Extremist parties, for example, can impose strong discipline on their members because, first, other parties are too distant to make switching likely and, second, the lack of nearby competitors means that they do not have to blur their labels to attract wavering voters (cf. Shepsle 1972). The focus on party switching spotlights the basic fact that parties are made up of individuals. This observation, while in itself neither controversial nor new, tends to be treated as an afterthought in studies of party behavior. By putting party switching front and center and treating it as a phenomenon of theoretical interest, the contributors to this book have gained—and offer to other analysts—new perspective not only on individual legislators’ behavior, but also on a broad range of political action, from party discipline to party systems. The choices that parties and their members make define party systems and, more generally, both the context and the content of political decision making. The contributions of Norman Schofield (chapter 3)

46


and Junko Kato and Kentaro Yamamoto (chapter 9), for example, take the interaction of party choices with voter choices (Schofield) or legislator ambition (Kato and Yamamoto) to characterize the evolution of party systems. Along similar lines, Kenneth Benoit and Gail McElroy (chapter 6) use party switching in the European Parliament to look at the development of a supranational political space. Their work suggests—contra the conventional wisdom that European voters pay little attention to European Union politics and policy making when they go to the polls—that the day might not be so far off when local, national, and supranational questions all impinge strongly on European voters’ voting behavior in every election, much as local, state, and federal questions affect vote choices in the United States.

2.4 Conclusion We characterize party switching as an aspect of strategic interaction among legislators. In so doing, we embed legislators’ decisions on party affiliation in a framework that ties them to the decisions both of party leaders and of voters, which are in turn contingent on the legislative party system. We also emphasize the effectiveness—indeed, the necessity—of focusing on individual actors to understand this larger picture. We do not examine party switching to understand it alone. True, party switching is interesting in itself, normatively, substantively, and theoretically, all the more so because it is not the idiosyncratic anomaly it has often been seen to be. More important, it affords new and powerful leverage on questions that have long attracted the attention of political scientists interested in such diverse areas as voting behavior, legislative organization, and party systems. The components of the framework presented in this chapter can be unpacked and applied in diverse ways by other theoretical and empirical researchers, as demonstrated by the analyses in the chapters that follow. Informed by the framework in this chapter, the contributors to this volume shed new light on the relationships among voters, legislators, party leaders, and the legislative party system.

2.5

Notes

1. Some moves are not voluntary, as discussed in the introduction. 2. The importance of parties goes beyond their utility to their individual members, of course. As students of collective dilemmas have shown, however, members of collectivities have little incentive to take the good of the


3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

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collectivity into account unless their behavior as individuals contributes directly to that good and unless they realize positive benefits as individuals from it (Olson 1965; Ostrom 1990). We recognize that there might be reasons for people who do not in fact want to hold office to present themselves as candidates. The publicity afforded by a political campaign could be useful for any number of reasons, for example. Those who are motivated by these non-office benefits of running are likely to be scarce in the universe of sitting legislators, however, and so we ignore them and their motivations here. Ultimately, we ascribe to the belief that preferences over political outcomes derive from preferences over policy outcomes. We do not wish to belabor the point, however, and allowing for preferences over both does not affect our argument. A strategic individual is one who makes decisions with an eye to outcomes, rather than just the choices immediately available, and in full awareness that other individuals are doing the same. In many electoral systems, party control of nomination processes and of candidate rankings on the ballot induces voters to view parties, not individual candidates, as the entities they elect. The information available to voters, however, varies across national settings and in particular across established and new democracies (cf. Cox and McCubbins 1997; Mershon and Shvetsova 2008; this volume; Moser 2001) with consequences for legislators’ and party leaders’ behavior that we explore. We could complicate things greatly by including voter considerations of coalition games. We do not—although we do think that in some circumstances voters might actually think in those terms (or at least parties do, as evidence from Germany on voting for FDP suggests; Riker 1982; Anderson 1995). In some legislatures, members not formally affiliated with a party group belong to a formally established “mixed group”; in others, they have the status of independents, which could be disadvantageous. In Norway, for example, independents receive only half the nonsalary budget resources that they would get as members of a party (personal communication from Hans Brattestå, Secretary General of the Norwegian Storting, May 26, 2004). Personal preferences might derive from constituencies, particularly in single member district (SMD) or proportional representation (PR) systems with strong local nominating authorities. For our purposes, the difference between such electorally driven preferences and a legislator’s “own” preferences is simply that in most cases electorally driven preferences probably are harder for a party to suppress. The two types of discipline are linked in one way, inasmuch as punishments for breaking party discipline are meted out in terms of blocked ambition. Good behavior is not necessarily a guarantee of good career prospects, however.

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2.6 References Àgh, Attila. 1999. “The Parliamentarization of the East Central European Parties: Party Discipline in the Hungarian Parliament, 1990–1996.” In Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, ed. Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz, 167–188. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aldrich, John H., and William T. Bianco. 1992. “A Game-Theoretic Model of Party Affiliation of Candidates and Office Holders.” Mathematical and Computer Modelling 16 (8/9): 103–116. Anderson, Christopher. 1995. Blaming the Government: Citizens and the Economy in Five European Democracies. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Ansolabehere, Stephen, James M. Snyder, Jr., and Charles Stewart III. 2001. “The Effects of Party and Preferences on Congressional Roll Call Voting.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 26 (4): 533–572. Bowler, Shaun, David M. Farrell, and Richard Katz. 1999. “Party Cohesion, Party Discipline, and Parliaments.” In Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, ed. Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz, 3–22. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Campbell, Andrea C., Gary W. Cox, and Mathew D. McCubbins. 2001. “Agenda Power in the U.S. Senate, 1877 to 1986.” In Party, Process, and Political Change: New Perspectives on the History of Congress, ed. David Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, 146–165. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cox, Gary W. 1987. The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World’s Electoral Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. 1993. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1994. “Bonding, Structure, and the Stability of Political Parties: Party Government in the House.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 19 (2): 215–231. ———. 1997. “Political Structure and Economic Policy: The Institutional Determinants of Policy Outcomes.” In Political Institutions and the Determinants of Public Policy: When Do Institutions Matter? ed. Stephen Haggard and Mathew D. McCubbins. San Diego: University of California. ———. 2001. “Agenda Power in the House of Representatives.” In Party, Process, and Political Change: New Perspectives on the History of Congress, ed. David Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, 107–145. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desposato, Scott W. 2006. “Parties for Rent? Ambition, Ideology, and Party Switching in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (1): 62–80.


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D’Onofrio, Francesco. 1979. “Committees in the Italian Parliament.” In Committees in Legislatures, ed. John David Lees and Malcolm T. Shaw, 61–101. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Filippov, Mikhail, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Olga V. Shvetsova. 2004. Designing Federalism: A Theory of Self-Sustainable Federal Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, Michael, and Michael Marsh, eds. 1988. Candidate Selection in Comparative Perspective: The Secret Garden of Politics. London: Sage. Greif, Avner. 2006. Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, William B. 2001. “Political Denials: The Policy Effect of Intercameral Partisan Differences in Bicameral Parliamentary Systems.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 17 (1): 34–61. ———. 2007. “Divided Politics: Bicameralism, Parties, and Policy in Democratic Legislatures.” Annual Review of Political Science 10: 245–269. Heller, William B., and Carol Mershon. 2005. “Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996–2001.” Journal of Politics 67 (2): 536–559. ———. 2008. “Dealing in Discipline: Party Switching and Legislative Voting in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000.” American Journal of Political Science 52 (4): 910–925. Heller, William B., Philip Keefer, and Mathew D. McCubbins. 1998. “Political Structure and Economic Liberalization: Cases from the Developing World.” In The Origins of Liberty: Political and Economic Liberalization in the Modern World, ed. Paul W. Drake and Mathew D. McCubbins, 146–178. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hey, John D., and Chris J. McKenna. 1979. “To Move or Not to Move?” Economica 46 (182): 175–185. Kiewiet, D. Roderick, and Mathew D. McCubbins. 1991. The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krehbiel, Keith. 1993. “Where’s the Party?” British Journal of Political Science 23: 235–266. Laver, Michael, and Kenneth A. Shepsle. 1999. “How Political Parties Emerged from the Primeval Slime: Party Cohesion, Party Discipline, and the Formation of Governments.” In Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, ed. Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz, 23–48. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Laver, Michael, and Kenneth Benoit. 2003. “The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections.” American Journal of Political Science 47 (2, April): 215–233. Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. 1990. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luebbert, Gregory. 1986. Comparative Democracy: Policy-Making and Government Coalitions in Europe and Israel. New York: Columbia University Press. McCarty, Nolan M., Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. 2001. “The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress.” American Political Science Review 95 (3): 673–687.

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McDonald, Michael D. 2004. “Parties in Democracy, Democracy in Parties: Lessons I Learned from Ian Budge and the CMP Data.” Binghamton. Mershon, Carol, and Olga Shvetsova. 2008. “Parliamentary Cycles and Party Switching in Legislatures.” Comparative Political Studies 41 (1): 99–127. Mershon, Carol, and William B. Heller. 2003. “Party Switching and Political Careers in the Spanish Congress of Deputies, 1982–1996.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 3–6. Miskin, Sarah. 2003. “Politician Overboard: Jumping the Party Ship.” Unpublished paper. Parliament of Australia: Parliamentary Library—Politics and Public Administration Group. Moser, Robert G. 2001. Unexpected Outcomes: Electoral Systems, Political Parties, and Representation in Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Müller, Wolfgang C., and Kaare Strøm, eds. 1999. Policy, Office, or Votes: How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nokken, Timothy P. 2000. “Dynamics of Congressional Loyalty: Party Defection and Roll Call Behavior, 1947–1997.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 25 (3): 414–444. Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Edited by J. E. Alt and D. C. North. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rasch, Bjørn Erik. 1999. “Electoral Systems, Parliamentary Committees, and Party Discipline: The Norwegian Storting in a Comparative Perspective.” In Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, ed. Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz, 121–140. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Riker, William H. 1982. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science.” American Political Science Review 76 (4): 753–766. Rohde, David W. 1991. Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sánchez de Dios, Manuel. 1999. “Parliamentary Party Discipline in Spain.” In Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government, ed. Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell, and Richard S. Katz, 141–162. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Shepsle, Kenneth A. 1972. “The Strategy of Ambiguity: Uncertainty and Electoral Competition.” American Political Science Review 66 (2): 555–568. Snyder, James M., Jr., and Michael M. Ting. 2002. “An Informational Rationale for Political Parties.” American Journal of Political Science 46 (1): 90–110. Strøm, Kaare. 1990. “A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties.” American Journal of Political Science 34 (2, May): 565–598. ———. 1994. “The Presthus Debacle: Intraparty Politics and Bargaining Failure in Norway.” American Political Science Review 88 (1): 112–127.


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———. 2000. “Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies.” European Journal of Political Research 37 (3): 261–289. Tomás Mallén, Beatriz. 2002. Transfuguismo parlamentario y democracia de partidos. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Tsebelis, George. 1990. Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turan, Ilter. 1985. “Changing Horses in Midstream: Party Changers in the Turkish National Assembly.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 10 (1): 21–34.


II

Party Switching and Representation


3 Switching Equilibria* Norman Schof ield

Abstract Models of elections typically indicate that all parties, in equilibrium, will adopt positions at the electoral center. This situation, however, is seldom observed. This chapter outlines how an integrated theory of party strategy may be constructed based on a theorem for existence of Local Nash Equilibrium (LNE) in a stochastic electoral model where political agents have differing valence, or electorally perceived quality. In a model based on exogenous valence, it is shown that, under proportional representation, a high valence political leader may be motivated to switch party so as to control a centrist policy position. Under plurality rule, political agents may be forced to switch party as a result of the conflicting demands of activist coalitions.

3.1

A Model of Electoral Competition and Party Switching

A fully developed formal theory of politics would connect the nature of the electoral system, the motivations of parties concerning policy and perquisites, and the process of government formation, in a way which makes sense of the empirical phenomena. A number of attempts have been made to model the motivations of parties in a game-theoretic framework. For example, one class of models is based on the Downsian framework, where parties compete via policy declarations to the electorate to maximize the number of seats they obtain. Since parties are assumed in these models to be indifferent to policy objectives, viewing policy solely as a means to gain power, symmetry would suggest that one equilibrium would be the situation where all parties declare the same position. In the standard spatial model

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Norman Schofield

(Downs 1957; Hotelling 1929), convergence of this kind is a typical result. There is substantial evidence that convergence by all parties to an electoral center is an extremely unlikely phenomenon (Schofield and Sened 2006). Partly as a result of this theoretical difficulty with the formal electoral model, and also because of the need to develop empirical models of voter choice, this chapter focuses on a “stochastic” vote model. In such a model, the behavior of each voter is characterized by a vector of choice probabilities determined by the candidate positions (Hinich 1977; Lin, Enelow, and Dorussen 1999). Again, a standard result in the class of stochastic models is that all parties converge to the electoral origin when the parties are motivated to maximize vote share or plurality (in the two party case) (Banks and Duggan 2005; McKelvey and Patty 2006). Recent formal analysis (Schofield 2006; 2007) shows that the convergence result need not hold if there is an asymmetry in the electoral perception of the “quality” of the political agents (Stokes 1992). The average weight given to the perceived quality of a political agent is called the agent’s valence.1 In empirical models, adding valence to the model increases the statistical significance of the model (Schofield and Sened 2006). In these empirical models, valence is usually assumed to be exogenous, in the sense of being independent of the agent’s position. The early empirical work by Poole and Rosenthal (1984) on US presidential elections included these exogenous valence terms and noted that there was no evidence of candidate convergence. This chapter discusses this general model of elections based on the assumption that there are two kinds of valence. The first kind is an intrinsic or exogenous valence, which for a political agent j is denoted lj. As in empirical work, we assume that lj is held constant at the time of an election and so is independent of the agents’s current position. 2 The second kind of valence is known as activist valence. When agent j adopts a policy position zj, in the policy space, X, then the activist valence of the agent is denoted μj(zj). Implicitly, we adopt a model originally due to Aldrich (1983a; 1983b) and Aldrich and McGinnis (1989). In this model, activists provide crucial resources of time and money to their chosen political agent, and these resources are dependent on the agents policy position.3 The agent then uses these resources to enhance its image before the electorate, thus affecting its overall valence. Although activist valence is affected by agent position, it does not operate in the usual way by influencing voter choice through the distance between a voter’s preferred policy position,

Switching Equilibria

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say xi, and the agent position. Rather, as agent j’s activist support, μj(zj), increases due to increased contributions to the agent in contrast to the support μk(zk) received by agent k, then (in the model) all voters become more likely to support agent j over agent k. 4 The problem for each political agent is that activists are likely to be more extreme than the typical voter. By choosing a policy position to maximize activist support, the agent will lose centrist voters. The agent must therefore determine the “optimal marginal condition” to maximize vote share. Theorem 1, presented in the following text, gives this as a (first order) balance condition. Moreover, because activist support is denominated in terms of time and money, it is reasonable to suppose that the activist function will exhibit decreasing returns. For example, in an extreme case, a political agent who has no activist support at all may benefit considerably by a small policy move to favor a particular interest group. On the other hand, when support is very substantial, then a small increase due to a policy move will little affect the electoral outcome. For this reason it is reasonable to assume that the functions themselves are concave, so their Hessians are everywhere negative-definite. Theorem 1 points out that when these functions are sufficiently concave, then the vote maximizing model will exhibit a Nash equilibrium. Because analysis of the stochastic model with activist valence is quite complex, this chapter also presents Theorem 2, for the case when activist valence is nonexistent. This theorem, valid for the case when only exogenous valence is relevant, gives the necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence of political agents to the electoral center. In applying these result to the question of the switching of the positions and party affiliations of political agents, Theorem 2 is used to examine the Israeli Knesset in the elections betweem 1996 and 2006. These elections can be considered paradigmatic examples of political positioning under an electoral system that is highly proportional. To understand these elections, we assume that parties adopt positions that are similar to their vote maximizing positions, as given by the stochastic vote model with exogenous valence. To further examine the nature of coalition bargaining, we use the idea of the core, presented earlier in Laver and Schofield (1990), to argue that a dominant party, located at the center of the policy space, can control the formation of government. In the postelection phase, the positions of the parties are assumed to be given, as is the distribution of seats. This distribution defines a set of winning coalitions. The compromise sets

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Norman Schofield

of these various winning coalitions may intersect, to define a single policy point, the core. If the core is stable under small perturbations in the positions of the parties, then it is said to be structurally stable. If a party’s position is at the structurally stable core, then we shall call this party the core party. Under these circumstances, it is argued that the core party will dominate the formation of government. If the compromise sets do not intersect, then they will define a domain in the policy space, known as the heart. This model of the heart can then be used to characterize the general pattern of coalition bargaining and government formation. Because the coalition situation is very different depending on whether the core is empty or nonempty, it is argued that a party leader will have a very strong incentive to seek the central core, but only when the party leader has a very high valence. It is consistent with this argument that the policy move by Ariel Sharon, the leader of Likud in the Israel Knesset, in the months before the March 2006 election, was possible precisely because Sharon had such a high exogenous valence. To make such a policy move, Sharon had to switch out of the party, Likud, and create a new party called Kadima (“Forward”). It is implicit in this argument that political moves by other low valence parties would have had an insignificant effect on the political configuration. In contrast, I suggest that the role of activists in a plurality electoral system provides extensive scope, in principle, for party switching. To apply Theorem 1, first consider presidential elections in the United States. To illustrate the idea, consider figure 3.1, and suppose that the economic dimension alone is relevant for political policymaking. We assume that there is an electoral distribution of voter ideal points, whose mean we take as the electoral origin. If we ignore activism for the moment, then the results of the following section show that there are two very different possibilities, depending on the parameters of the model. If the exogenous valences, ldem and lrep, of the Democrat and Republican candidates are sufficiently similar, then both candidates will position themselves at the electoral origin, and both will gain approximately 50 percent of the vote. In this case, potential activists are unlikely to be motivated to contribute to the parties. On the other hand, if the valences differ sufficiently, with ldem > lrep, say, then the lower valence candidate will vacate the origin to increase vote share. For purposes of exposition, we may suppose that conservative economic activists have the preferred position, E. If the Republican candidate moves away from the origin, to a position


59

Social Liberal Social Liberal indifference curve

B

E

R us h

D R*

nc e Bala

loc

Pro-Capital

fo us

ala er B t a w Gold

C

Economic conservative indifference curve

loc us

to n

D*

rB

Pro-Labor

Clin

L

John

so nB

S Contract curve between economic and locus social liberals ce an al locus nce a l a

e nc

Contract curve between economic and social conservatives

Social Conservative

Figure 3.1

Activist coalitions in the United States.

similar to R, then conservative economic activists would be induced to support this candidate. The asymmetry induced by this support will cause liberal economic activists at L to support the Democratic candidate. Then R will be pulled further toward E, while D will be pulled toward L. Moreover, if the marginal effect of activists for the Republicans is greater than for the Democrats, then the optimal candidate positions, R and D, will satisfy |R| > |D|. This model implies that once the convergent equilibrium is destroyed because of some exogenous change in parameters, and activists become motivated to support the appropriate parties, then convergence can never be recreated. Note that, in terms of the model, there is no reason why R should be to the right, and L to the left. However, once the move is made in one direction or the other, then activist support will tend to reinforce the left-right positioning of the parties. This simple marginal calculation becomes more interesting when there is a second “social” dimension of policy. Consider the initial positions R and D, on either side of, and approximately equidistant from the origin, as in the figure. Both Social Conservatives, represented by C, and Social Liberals represented by S, would be indifferent between both parties. A Democratic candidate by moving to position D* will

60

Norman Schofield

benefit from activist support by the social liberals, but will lose some support from the liberal economic activists. Note that the figure is based on the supposition that activists are characterized by ellipsoidal indifference contours, reflecting the different saliences (or emphases) they put on the policy axes. The contract curve between the two activist groups, centered at L and S, represents the set of conflicting interests or “bargains” that can be made between these two groups over the policy to be followed by the candidate. Miller and Schofield (2003) showed that this contract curve between the economic and social liberals is a catenary whose curvature is determined by the eccentricity of the utility functions of the activist groups (See also Schofield and Miller 2007; Miller and Schofield 2008). We therefore call this contract curve the Democratic activist catenary. In the same way, the Republican activist catenary is given by the contract curve between economic conservative activists, positioned at E, and social conservative activists, positioned at C. Theorem 1 gives the balance condition that a pair of positions, such as (D*, R*) in figure 3.1, constitute a Nash equilibrium for the vote maximizing game between the agents. These equilibrium positions will lie on what are called the balance locii of the agents. These balance locii will depend on the exogenous valences of the two candidates, as well as on the relative willingness of the various activist groups to provide support. For example, because the exogenous valence of Goldwater was much lower than Johnson in the 1964 election (Schofield, Miller, and Martin 2003), we can infer that the balance locus of Goldwater was further from the origin than that of Johnson (as illustrated in figure 3.1). The figure also presents plausible balance locii for Bush and Clinton in the elections of 2000 and 1992, respectively. This model of activist support for presidential candidates (Miller and Schofield 2003; 2007; Schofield and Miller 2007) provides a more complex model of candidate positioning than the more simple model with exogenous valence. It suggests that candidates must juggle the opposed interests of competing activist groups. In recent US elections, the issues that concern voters and activist groups have involved the so-called war against terror, immigration, stem cell research, and so forth. These crosscutting issues create the possibility that a candidate for congressional office will jump or switch party, when the candidate believes that the party is overly dominated by certain activist groups whose policy positions are in opposition to the candidate. For example, a traditional Republican, such as John Danforth of Missouri,


61

with a policy position at E, may feel that his party is dominated by activists at C, possibly causing him to switch to a Democrat party that has adopted policies close to S. This model is applied in section 3.4 to discuss such recent examples of party switching by candidates in congressional and gubernatorial elections. The general conclusions that can be drawn from the formal models are (i) Under proportional rule, and with exogeneous valence alone, there will be a centripetal tendency toward the electoral center that will make itself felt only for political agents with high valence. In particular, if a party leader has a very high valence, such as Sharon in Israel, then this leader will have an incentive to leave his old party so as to be able to take up a dominant position at the core of the political configuration. Low valence party leaders, in contrast, will be subject to a centrifugal tendency toward the electoral periphery. In a situation where the core is empty, then policy repositioning by low valence party leaders will have a negligible effect on the political configuration. (ii) In an electoral system based on plurality rule, such as the United States, activist groups have a significant effect on candidate positioning. Policy positions adopted by candidates will involve compromises between the more extreme positions preferred by activists, and the centrist positions that win votes. In a two-dimensional context, candidates for office may be obliged to switch parties (and choose new policy positions) to gain activist support from groups that previously opposed the candidate. In particular, when policy concerns are polarized, and activist groups play a major role, then party switching may induce a dramatic realignment of the two-party system.

3.2 Local Nash Equilibrium in the Stochastic Electoral Model The purpose of this section is to present a model of positioning of parties in electoral competition so as to account for the generally observed phenomenon of nonconvergence. The model presented here is an extension of the multiparty stochastic model of Lin, Enelow, and Dorussen (1999) and McKelvey and Patty (2006), constructed by inducing asymmetries in terms of valence. The basis for this extension is the varied empirical evidence that valence is a significant component of the judgments made by voters of political agents. The stochastic model essentially assumes that political agents cannot predict

62

Norman Schofield

vote response precisely, but can estimate an expected vote share. In the model with valence, the stochastic element is associated with the weight given by each voter, i, to the average perceived quality or “valence” of the political agent. At a particular election, valence will be due to the “integral” of the agent’s competence in the past and expectations about future competence. Valence may also be effected by the resources available to the agent, and in particular the degree of positive media exposure that the agent can exploit. There are a number of possible choices for the appropriate game form for multiparty competition. The simplest one, which is used here, is that the utility function for agent j is proportional to the vote share, Vj, of the agent. With this assumption, we can examine the conditions on the parameters of the stochastic model that are necessary and sufficient for the existence of a Pure strategy Nash Equilibrium (PNE) for this particular game form. This chapter uses calculus techniques to estimate optimal positions. As usual with this form of analysis, we can obtain the necessary conditions for the existence of local optima, or local pure strategy Nash equilibria (LNE). Clearly, any PNE will be a LNE, but not conversely. However, in the models considered here, it is evident that the necesary condition fails, leading to the inference that PNE are typically nonexistent. Although the true utility functions of party leaders are unknown, the comparison of LNE, obtained by simulation of empirical stochastic models, with the estimated positions of parties in the various polities that have been studied suggest that the valence model provides a close first order approximation to the political game. Definition 1. The Stochastic Vote Model M(l, μ, b; C) with Activist Valence for a policy space X of dimension w. (i) Each of the parties in the set P = {1, . . ., j, . . ., p} chooses a policy, zj ∈ X to declare. Let z = (z1, . . ., zp) ∈ Xp be a typical vector of party policy positions. Given z, each voter, i, is described by a vector ui(xi, z) = (ui1(xi, z1), . . ., uip(xi, zp)), where uij(xi, zj) = lj + μj(zj) − bxi − zj2 + eij. = u*ij ( xi , z j ) + ⑀ ij .

(

)

(1) (2)

Here u*ij xi , z j is the observable component of utility. The term, lj, is the intrinsic or exogenous valence of party j, while the function


63

μj(zj) is the component of valence generated by activist contributions to agent j. It is assumed that the resources contributed by activists are used by the political agent to enhance its image through advertising and the like. The term b is a positive constant, called the spatial parameter, giving the importance of policy difference defined in terms of a metric induced from the Euclidean norm, · , on X. The vector ei = (ei1, . . ., eij, . . ., eip) is the stochastic error. It is assumed the multivariate cumulative distribution of each ei is identical. This distribution is denoted by C. (ii) The exogenous valence vector

l = (l1, l2, . . ., lp)

satisfies lp ≥ lp−1 ≥ . . . ≥ l2 ≥ l1.

(iii) Voter behavior is modeled by a probability vector. The probability that a voter i chooses party j at the vector z is rij(z) = Pr[[uij(xi, zj) > uil(xi, zl)], for all l ≠ j] = Pr [⑀il − ⑀ij < u*ij (xi , z j ) − u*il (xi , z j ), for all l ≠ j ].

(3)

(4)

Here Pr stands for the probability operator generated by the distribution assumption on e. (iv) The expected vote share of agent j is Vj z

1 ␳ij z . n i N

(5) p

The differentiable function V : Xp → \ is called the party profile function. Definition 2. Equilibrium Concepts. (i) A strategy vector z* z1* , !, z*p X p is a local strict Nash equip librium (LSNE) for the profile function V : Xp → \ iff, for each agent j e P, the policy z*j strictly locally maximizes Vj ( ! z*j −1 , −, z*j +1 ! ) . (ii) A strategy vector z* is a weak Nash equilibrium (PNE) iff, for each agent j, z*j weakly but globally maximizes Vj ! z*j1 , , z*j 1 !, .

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The most common assumption in empirical analyses is that C is the Type I extreme value distribution (sometimes called Gumbel). The theorems presented in this chapter are based on this assumption. This distribution assumption is the basis for much empirical work based on multinomial logit (MNL) estimation. Dow and Endersby (2004: 111) also suggest that “researchers are justified in using MNL specifications.” Definition 3. The Type I Extreme Value Distribution, C. The cumulative distribution, C, has the closed form C(h) = exp [– exp [–h]]. It follows from this that for each voter i, and agent j, the probability that a voter i chooses party j at the vector z is

ρij(z) = [1 + ∑k≠j[exp(f k)]] –1

(6)

where f k = lk + μk(zk) − lj − μj(zj) + bxi − zj2 − bxi − zk2 . It can be shown that the first order condition for z* to be a LSNE is that it be a balance solution. Definition 4. The balance solution z* = (z1* ,!, z*j ,!, z*p ) for the model M(l, μ, b; C) is given by the set of equations, j = 1, . . . p: n ¯ 1 d␮ j ¡ ␣ij xi z*j ° 0 ¡¢ i 1 °± 2␤ dz j

(7)

␳ ␳2 ¯ ij ij ° ␣ij ¯ ¡¡ 2 ° where ¡¢ °± ¡ ␳ ␳ij ° ¢ i ij ±

(8)

and [ρij] = [ρij(z*)] is the matrix of choice probabilities at z*. n The vector i 1 ␣ij xi . is the weighted electoral mean of agent j. The bracketed term on the left of expression (7) is termed the marginal electoral pull of agent j and is a gradient vector pointing toward the weighted electoral mean of the agent. Thus, the weighted electoral d␮ mean is that point where the electoral pull is zero. The vector dz is called the marginal activist pull for agent j. j

j


65

The following theorems are proved in Schofield (2006, 2007). See also Schofield (2008). Theorem 1. Consider the electoral model M(l, μ, b; C) based on the Type I extreme value distribution, and including both exogenous and activist valences. (i) The first order condition for z* to be an LSNE is that it is a balance solution. (ii) If all activist valence functions are highly concave, in the sense of having negative eigenvalues of sufficiently great modulus, then the balance solution will be a PNE. □ The following theorem classifies the model M(l, b; C), when all activist functions are identically zero. To state the theorem, the coordinates are first transformed, so that in the new coordinates, x* n1 xi 0. The vector z 0 = (0, . . ., 0) i is termed the joint origin in this new coordinate system. Whether the joint origin is an equilibrium depends on the distribution of voter ideal points. These are encoded in the electoral covariance matrix. Definition 5: The electoral covariance matrix, ∇ is the w by w matrix r 1,!, w th ␰ r , ␰ s ¯ ¢ ± s1,!, w where ξr = (x1r, x2r, . . ., xnr) is the n vector of the r coordinates of voter ideal points, and (ξr, ξs) refers to scalar product. 2 Write ␷ s = 1n (␰ s , ␰ s ) for the electoral variance on the sth axis and 1 n

w

1 w ␰ s , ␰ s trace

n s1 s 1 for the total electoral variance. The formal model just presented, and based on C is denoted M(l, b; C).

␷ 2 ␷ s2

Theorem 2. (i) At the vector z0 = (0, . . ., 0) the probability ␳ij(z0) that i votes for agent j is independent of i and is given by

¯

¢¡

±°

1

␳ j ¡¡1 exp ¢¡␭k ␭j ¯±° °° kv j

(9)

(ii) The Hessian of the vote share function of the low valence party, 1, at the vector z0 is C1 = 2[b(1 − 2r1)∇ − I],

(10)

66

Norman Schofield where I is the ω by ω identity matrix.

(11)

(iii) The condition for the joint origin to be a LSNE in the model M(l, b; C) is that C1 has negative eigenvalues. □ Corollary 1 Assume X is two dimensional. Then, for the model M = M(l, b; C), the sufficient condition for the joint origin to be a LSNE is that the coefficient c(l, b; C) = 2b[1 − 2r1]trace(∇) is strictly less than 1. Corollary 2 In the case that X is w-dimensional, the necessary condition for the joint origin to be a LSNE is that c(l, b; C) < w.

3.3

Empirical Analyses for Israel

3.3.1 The Israeli Knesset in 1996 and 2006 To illustrate Theorem 2, consider the case of Israel in 1996. Figure 3.2 shows the estimated positions of the parties at the time of the 1996 election in a two dimensional policy space (see Schofield and Sened 2006 for details). Table 3.1 presents summary statistics of the 1996 election, together with valence estimates based on a stochastic model derived from a voter survey (Arian and Shamir 1999). It is readily shown that one of the eigenvalues of the NRP is positive. Indeed it is obvious that there is a principal component of the electoral distribution, and this axis is the eigenspace of the positive eigenvalue. The formal analysis indicates that low valence parties should position themselves on this eigenspace as illustrated in the simulation given in figure 3.3. As table 3.1 indicates, the lowest valence party was the NRP with valence −4.52. The spatial coefficient is b = 1.12, and the electoral variances on the two axes are 1.0 and 0.732 respectively. Computations for the model M(C) give the following: 1 0. 1 e 4.15 4.52 e 3.14 4.52 1.0 0.591¯ ° ¡ ¡0.591 0.732° ¢ ±

␳ NRP

1.24 1.32¯ ° CNRP 2 1.12 I ¡ ¡1.32 0.64° ¢ ± c ␭, ␤; ⌿ 3.88.

2

Yahadut Shas 1 Moledet

Religion

Likud 0

Olim

Labor

Ill way

−1

Tzomet

Meretz Dem-Arab communists

−2 −1

−2

0

1

2

Security Figure 3.2 Party positions in the Israeli Knesset 1996.

Table 3.1

Seats, votes, and valences in the Knesset 1996

Party Others Left Meretz Labor Center Likud Shas NRP Moledet Yahadut a b

1996

1996

National Vote % Sample Vote % Seats 7.3 7.6 27.5 3.2 25.8 8.7 8.0 2.4 3.7

0 6.0 44.0 1.8 43.0 2.0 5.1 1.8 1.8

9 9 34 11 32 10 9 2 4

1996

1999 2003

Valence

Seats

Seats

– 0 4.15 –2.34 3.14 –2.96 –4.52 –0.89 –

10 10 28 18 23 17 5 4 5

9 6 21 15 47a 11b 6 – 5b

Israel Beitenu obtained 7 seats in 2003, which I have included with Likud. To simplify Figure 3.4, I have combined the seat totals for Shas and Yahadut.

68

Norman Schofield 2

1

1

Religion

4

0 3

6 5

2

7

−1

−2 −2

−1

0

1

2

Security Key: 1=Shas, 2=Likud, 3=Laor, 4=NRP, 5=Moledet, 6=Third Way, 7=Meretz Figure 3.3

A local Nash equilibrium in the Knesset in 1996.

The eigenvalues of C NRP are 2.28 and −0.40, giving a saddlepoint, and a value for the coefficient, c(l, b; C), of 3.88. This exceeds the necessary upper bound of 2.0, required for an equilibrium at the joint origin. We immediately infer that all local equilibria are nonconvergent. The major eigenvector for the NRP is (1.0, 0.8), and along this axis the NRP vote share function increases as the party moves away from the origin. The minor, perpendicular axis is given by the vector (1, –1.25) and on this axis the NRP vote share decreases as the party moves away from the origin. Figure 3.3, gives one of the local equilibria in 1996, obtained by simulation of the model. The figure makes it clear that the vote maximizing positions lie on the principal axis through the origin and the point (1.0, 0.8). Five different LSNE were located: in all cases, the two high valence parties, Labor and Likud, were located at almost precisely the same positions. The only


69

difference between any two of these various equilibria were that the positions of the low valence parties were somewhat perturbed. The simulations of vote maximizing positions were compatible with the predictions of the formal model based on the extreme value distribution. All parties were able to increase vote shares by moving away from the origin, along the principal axis, as determined by the large, positive principal eigenvalue. In particular, the simulation confirms the logic of the above analysis. Low valence parties, such as the NRP and Shas, in order to maximize vote shares must move far from the electoral center. Their optimal positions will lie either in the northeast quadrant or the southwest quadrant. In contrast, since the valence difference between Labor and Likud was relatively low in the elections of 1988, 1992, and 1996, the relevant eigenvalues on the major axis, for their Hessians at the origin, were also low (but still positive) and their optimal positions would be relatively close to, but not identical to, the electoral mean. Simulation for the elections of 1988, 1992, and 1996 were compatible with this theoretical inference. It should be noted that the positions of Labor and Likud are particularly closely matched by their positions in the simulated vote maximizing equilibria. Clearly, the configuration of equilibrium party positions will fluctuate as the valences of the large parties change in response to exogenous shocks. The logic of the model remains valid however, since the low valence parties will be obliged to adopt relatively radical positions to maximize their vote shares. It is important to note, however, that the positions of the low valence parties in figure 3.2 are similar, but not identical, to their estimated vote maximizing equilibrium position as given in figure 3.3. This strongly suggests that an appropriate model of party positioning assumes that parties are concerned with policy, and adopt positions with a view toward the coalitions that may form after the election. One way to express this inference is as follows: The close correspondence between the simulated LSNE based on the empirical analysis and the estimated actual political configuration suggests that the true utility function for each party j has the form Uj (z) = Vj (z) + δj (z), where δj (z) may depend on the beliefs of party members about the postelection coalition possibilities and on the support of activist coalitions. This suggests that in any political equilibrium of the electoral game, a party can position itself at the electoral origin only when its leader has a very high valence in contrast to all other competing political leaders.

70

3.3.2

Norman Schofield

Recent Switches in the Israeli Knesset

This section discusses recent changes in the political configuration in Israel. Figure 3.4 provides a schematic representation of the Knesset based on the party positions after the election of 2003. The figure shows Labor with 21 seats, after Am Ehad, with 2 seats, joined Labor in 2003, while Likud has 40 seats after being joined by Olim, with 2 seats. Although Barak, of Labor, became prime minister in 1999, he was defeated by Ariel Sharon, of Likud, in the election for prime minister in 2000. Schofield (1999) and Schofield and Sened (2006) propose a set known as the heart to describe the set of policies that may occur as a result of coalition bargaining. The figure indicates that there are three plausible governments: Likud, Shinui, and a religious party; Likud and Shas/Shinui; and a coalition of the left, led by Labor, with support from Shas/Shinui. These coalition possibilities are encapsulated in the idea of the heart (the triangular domain in figure 3.4). Notice that this domain is insensitive to small changes in location or strength of these parties. Given the vector of leader exogenous valences at the time of the 2003 election, it is reasonable to suppose that the

Shas (16)

Religion

NRP (6) Likud (40) Labor (21) Shinui (15) Meretz (6) Arab (9) Security

Figure 3.4

Party positions in the Knesset in 2003.

Israel Beiteinu (7)


71

election result would give rise to an empty core. Notice that the party positions given in figure 3.4 are consistent with the empirical and simulation analysis presented earlier. In particular, it is obvious that neither Likud nor Labor are located at the electoral origin.5 Now consider figure 3.5, which presents estimates of the party positions at the election of March, 2006. In a highly publicized move before the election, Sharon left the Likud Party and signaled a strong move to the left by allying with Shimon Peres, the former leader of Labor and the author of the Oslo accords, together with a number of other senior Labor Party members, to form the new party, Kadima. This move positioned Kadima at the origin of the electoral space at (0, 0), as shown in figure 3.5. Following Sharon’s stroke in January 2006, Ehud Olmert took over as leader of Kadima and was able to win 29 seats. Likud took only 12 seats, while the 4 parties on the upper right of the figure won 38 seats. One surprise of the election was the appearance of a Pensioners’ party with 7 seats. The consequence of this sequence of events is that Kadima secured itself a weakly dominant position in the Knesset. The Kadima position in figure 3.5 can be readily be seen to be a policy core (Laver and Schofield 1990). To

Religion

Shas, Yahadut (12+6)

Labor (19)

NRP (9)

Kadima (29) Likud (12) Pensioners (7)

Arab (10)

Meretz (5)

Security Figure 3.5

Party positions in the Knesset in 2006.

Israel Beiteinu (11)

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Norman Schofield

see this, note that the convex hull of the policy positions of parties in any winning coalition (with more than 61 seats) must include the position of Kadima. Notice, however, that the core position of Kadima is structurally unstable, in the sense that a small move by Labor on the vertical axis creates the possibility of a counter-Kadima coalition, involving Labor and Likud. As long as Labor is situated at the position given in figure 3.5, then Kadima will be able to veto any attempt to construct a winning coalition government excluding Kadima. The simulations of the 1996 election in Israel demonstrated that Likud was previously unable to capture the core. By moving Labor to the left, Peretz created the opportunity for Sharon to out maneuver him, allowing Sharon to strategically move to a position that would increase the probability that he would control the core. Because Sharon’s own party members would not support him in this move, he had to leave Likud and form Kadima. The formal analysis presented earlier suggests that the location of Kadima at the electoral origin was a vote maximizing position for the party because of the high valence difference between Sharon and Peretz.6 It thus appears that Sharon’s shift in party and his change of policy has led to a fundamental transformation in the political configuration, from the coalition structure without a core (that had persisted since 1996), to a new configuration, associated with the center, core party, Kadima. Even though Kadima is estimated to be a core party after the 2006 election, Olmert needed the support of Labor to be able to deal with the complex issue of fixing a permanent border for Israel. The debacle in Lebanon severely weakened Olmert’s popularity, and in October 2006, the 61 members of the Kadima-Labor governing coalition voted to bring Israel Beiteinu into the coalition. The April 2007 report on the failure of the government during the war with Lebanon in summer 2006 has threatened the stability of the government. Barak won the election for the Labor party leadership on June 12, 2007, and became minister of defense in the Kadima-led government on June 18, 2007, while Shimon Peres became president. On February 3, 2008, Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Israeli Beiteinu, announced that the party would quit the government because of disagreement over issues such as Jerusalem, the refugees, and the nature of a future Palestinian state. Barak agreed to remain in the coalition, thus maintaining the majority of the coalition. However, as of July 2008, Olmert faces charges of corruption, and he only avoided a vote of no-confidence by agreeing to an election for leader of Kadima in the following September. Athough the Kadima government is structurally unstable, in the sense used here, it has opened negotiations with both Syria, over the


73

question of stability in Lebanon, and with Hamas, using Turkey and Egypt as intermediaries. In the February, 2009 election, the new leader of Kadima, Tzipi Livni, gained 28 seats, while Netanyahu, leader of Likud, took 28 seats. A coalition government still has not formed as of mid-March 2009.

3.4

Party Switches in the United States

As figure 3.1 suggests, social conservative activists have come to prominence in US presidential elections. As social conservatives gain control of the Republican political machinery in a given state or electoral district, socially moderate Republican candidates may be forced into the Democratic Party simply because they can no longer hope to win a Republican primary. The normal ambition of politicians transforms socially liberal Republicans into moderate Democrats. The result is increased party polarization on the social dimension and decreased party differences on the economic dimension. A case in point is John Moore, a longtime executive with Cessna Aircraft in Wichita; a pro-business conservative, he was nevertheless unlikely to win a Republican primary for any statewide position due to his “softness” on social issues. He consequently converted in 2002 and was elected as the Democratic lieutenant governor. Moore retired in 2006, and the open position brought about an even more dramatic development. Mark Parkinson officially switched parties in time to run for the lieutenant governor’s position. Parkinson, a former Republican Party Chairman for the state of Kansas, was elected lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket. Others in Kansas are going the same route. In 2004, Republican Cindy Neighbor switched parties to run for the state legislature, opposed to a social conservative who had defeated her in the primary in 2004. She was elected in 2006 (Milburn 2006). These ballot box conversions are not limited to ambitious Kansas moderates. Perhaps the most striking and visible such conversion was that of Jim Webb of Virginia. Webb is a much-decorated Vietnam war veteran who had been Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy. As recently as 2000, he supported Republican Allen to be the US Senator from Virginia. In 2006, however, he was a Democrat running against Allen. Traditional New Deal Democrats were aghast; but Webb defeated Allen, and his presence in the party moves the Democratic center of gravity to the right on economic policy. Each such switch makes further switches more likely. Although Kansas has been seen as a state in which the Democratic Party is all

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Norman Schofield

but defunct, the conversion of a small number of socially moderate Republicans to the Democratic Party could easily restore a healthy two party competition in Kansas. But in the process, each individual conversion changes what it means to be a Democrat (cf. Heller and Mershon this volume). Increasingly, a Democrat is an economic moderate or conservative who is strongly liberal on social issues—not (as in the New Deal), a strong economic liberal whose Democratic affiliation is a response to class conflict. These observations are not meant to advocate any particular strategy for either party. Rather, they suggest that partisan change continues to have a certain inevitability about it, despite the fond wishes of entrenched party activists. Each partisan realignment has occurred despite the opposition of existing party activists. Populist Democrats in the 1930s, who earlier supported William Jennings Bryan, were suspicious of the ethnic industrial laborers that the New Deal brought into the party. In the same way, traditional Republican activists were aghast when their candidate Rockefeller was booed for criticizing Goldwater-style radicalism at the 1964 convention (Branch 1998, 402). Partisan realignment is a dynamic process because of the destabilizing influence of vote-maximizing candidates who see opportunities to win elections even at the cost of generating some hostility within the ranks of the preexisting activist cadres. As a result, partisan identities are always changing, even though there is a tendency to see them as fixed and immutable. The Republican Party in 1868 was the post– civil war party of racial equality through strong national government. The Republican Party in 1948 was the party of the balanced budget and civil libertarianism. Neither of these identities proved to be immutable, and the current identities of both parties are again in flux. The departure of even a small number of pro-business social liberals from the Republican Party—like Jeffords of Vermont or Parkinson in Kansas—has inevitable effects on both parties. Each such departure increases the proportion of social conservatives in the Republican Party, making it easier for social conservatives to dominate both the party primaries and the activists who give the party its image to the nation. This in turn makes it even more difficult for social liberals to hope for a successful career within the GOP. Voters, as well as activists and candidates, adjust. If they are concerned about women’s rights or the separation of church and state, they are less likely to vote as Republican and more likely to shift to independent or Democratic status.


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At the same time, symmetrical adjustments are made in the Democratic Party. Just as Strom Thurmond’s conversion to the Republican Party helped trigger a long list of similar conversions by socially conservative Democrats, so each socially liberal Republican who converts to the Democratic party makes the social issue that triggered the conversion a more salient aspect of the Democratic identity. The Democratic Party and Republican Party become internally more homogeneous as regards economic policy, and more polarized with respect to social policy. Thus, as social polarization increases between the parties, the economic differences will slowly disappear. As pro-business social liberals join the Democratic Party, it will become increasingly difficult to imagine that party going back to a New Deal identity. Just as the New Deal Democratic Party consisted of segregationists and labor unions united on an antibusiness platform, the emerging Democratic Party will find itself united at a social liberal position, with a centrist position on economic policy. The proportion of Democrats who adopt a traditional antibusiness stance will be reduced. A simple electoral calculus by candidates will tend to move them to a Clinton-style moderate position on economic policy—advocating (among other things), a more inclusive policy toward immigrants, and a more enthusiastic commitment to stem cell and related medical research.

3.5 Concluding Remarks The theorems presented here, together with analysis of spatial policy maps (Schofield 2008), suggest the following set of tentative hypotheses about the nature of political competition. The examples from Israel and the United States allow for further hypotheses about the role of party switching in affecting coalition formation, under electoral systems based on proportional representation, and in influencing political realignment in plurality electoral systems. 1. The pure spatial model of direct democracy indicates that the occurence of a core, or unbeaten alternative, is very unlikely in a direct democracy using majority rule, when the dimension of the policy is at least two (Schofield 2008). However, a social choice concept known as the heart, a generalization of the core, will exist, and converges to the core when the core is nonempty (Schofield 1999). 2. A legislative body, made up of democratically elected representatives, can be modeled in social choice terms. Because party strengths will be

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

disparate, a large, centrally located party may be located at a core position. Such a party, even in a situation with no majority party, will be able to dominate the formation of coalition government, as suggested by the example from Israel. A more typical situation is one with no core party. In such a case, the legislative heart can give an indication of the nature of bargaining between parties as they attempt to form a winning coalition government. This theory of legislative behavior takes as given the position and strengths of the parties. Because a centrally located party may dominate coalitional bargaining, and because such a party should be able to garner a large share of the vote, there would appear to be a strong centripetal tendency in all electoral systems based on proportional representation. However, this tendency will be most relevant for a party whose leader has a high exogenous valence. Estimates of party positions indicate that parties adopt quite heterogenous positions.7 This suggests that there is a countervailing or centrifugal force that affects all parties other than those with very high valence. Although core parties can be observed in a number of polities with electoral systems based on proportional rule, the dominance of such center parties can be destroyed, particularly if there is a tendency to political fragmentation and social conflict. The stochastic model suggests that only a political leader with a high exogenous valence is able to move to a central position to control the core. Although the model with exogenous valence is able, in some circumstances, to predict the existence of a core party, it is suggested that the model with activist valence gives a better understanding of the extensive dispersion of positions of the parties.8 This suggests that party location can be modeled as a balancing act between the centripetal electoral pull, and the activist centrifugal pull. This implies that on occasion a party leader is subject to a conflict between the more extreme policy preferences of activists for his party, and the centripetal tendency implied by his high exogenous valence. A switch of policy position by a leader, such as Sharon in Israel in 2006, can then be rationalized in terms of the centripetal tendency implied by high valence. Under proportional electoral methods, there need be no strong tendency forcing activist groups to coalesce in order to concentrate their influence. Thus proportionality in the electoral system, as in Israel and many European polities (see Benoit and Laver 2006; Schofield 2008), leads to activist fragmentation and thus party fragmentation. Belgium is a good example, as discussed in Schofield (2008). More generally, it can be expected that low valence political leaders may switch parties particularly in situations where they perceive that they can gain increased resources from activist goups as a result of switching.


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10. Under plurality rule, small parties face the possibility of extinction. Unlike the situation in a polity based on proportional rule, an activist group linked to a small party in a plurality polity has little expectation of influencing government policy. Thus activist groups face increasing returns to scale, in terms of the relationship between the size of the political coalition that they influence on the one hand and political power and representation on the other. The activist model of elections presented in this chapter suggests that when there are two dimensions of policy, then there can be a number of principal, opposed activist groups. The nature of the electoral contest generally forces these activist groups to concentrate support for at most two parties, as in the United States. 11. Thus, in the United States, plurality rule induces the two party system, through this effect on activist groups. Although the two party configuration may be in equilibrium at any time, the tension within the activist coalitions induces a slow rotation, and thus political realignment. Candidates for political office, at the federal and local level, will be forced to balance the centripetal electoral effect against the centrifugal effect induced by activist groups. 12. On occasion in the United States, polarization within the two dimensions of policy may induce conflict within and between activist groups. These effects may become so pronounced that the two party system may become less stable.9 The illustrations presented in this chapter suggest that switching between parties can become extreme, leading eventually to a political realignment. 13. The well-known relationship between proportional representation and the degree of political fragmentation may be accounted for indirectly as a consequence of the logic forced on activist groups and the effect induced on the political configuration.

3.6

Notes

* This chapter is based on work supported by NSF grant 0715929, and a research grant from the Weidenbaum Center, Washington University. The chapter was revised while Schofield was a visiting fellow at ICER, Turin. Versions have been presented at conferences at Trinity College, Dublin, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and at Emory University. The figures are reproduced from Schofield and Sened (2006) with permission of Cambridge University Press. 1. Stokes (1963: 373) used the term valence issues to refer to those that “involve the linking of the parties with some condition that is positively or negatively valued by the electorate.” As he observes, “in American presidential elections . . . it is remarkable how many valence issues have held the center of the stage.” Stokes observation is validated by recent empirical work on many polities, as well as a study on the psychology of voting (Westen 2007).

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2. However, current exogenous valence will depend on the agents previous policy choices, and the outcome of these choices. As an illustration, George Bush’s low overall valence, as of July 2008, is a consequence of policy choices in the past that turned out to be imprudent. 3. For convenience, we assume that μj(zj) is only dependent on zj, and not on zk, k ≠ j, but this is not a crucial assumption. 4. In other words, it is not the source of the resources that matters, just the amount. 5. Jeong et al. (2008) estimate the 2003 election. Their results indicate that Sharon had a very high valence in 2003. 6. We may hypothesize that Sharon was able to position Kadima at the center precisely because of his high valence. 7. This is clearly indicated by the estimates of party position presented in Benoit and Laver (2006). 8. The empirical analyses in Schofield and Sened (2006) for Italy, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom support this inference. 9. Of course, there have been presidential elections, such as 1860, where activist polarization has been so strong that there were four competing candidates.

3.7 References Aldrich, John H. 1983a. “A Downsian Spatial Model with Party Activists.” American Political Science Review 77 (December): 974–990. ———. 1983b. “A Spatial Model with Party Activists: Implications for Electoral Dynamics.” Public Choice 41 (January): 63–100. Aldrich, John H. and Michael McGinnis. 1989. “A Model of Party Constraints on Optimal Candidate Locations.” Mathematical and Computer Modelling 12 (4–5): 437–450. Arian, Asher and Michal Shamir. 1999. The Election in Israel: 1996. Albany: SUNY Press. Banks, Jeff S. and John Duggan. 2005. “Probabilistic Voting in the Spatial Model of Elections.” In Social Choice and Strategic Decisions, ed. David AustenSmith and John Duggan. Heidelberg: Springer. Benoit, Kenneth and Michael Laver. 2006. Party Policy in Modern Democracies. London: Routledge. Branch, Taylor. 1998. Pillar of Fire. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dow, John K. and Jay Endersby. 2004. “Multinomial Probit and Multinomial Logit: A Comparison of Choice Models for Voting Research.” Electoral Studies 23 (March): 107–122. Downs, Anthony 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Hinich, Melvin. 1977. “Equilibrium in Spatial Voting: The Median Voter Result Is an Artifact.” Journal of Economic Theory 16 (2): 208–219. Hotelling, Harold 1929. “Stability in Competition.” Economic Journal 39 (March): 41–57.


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Jeong, Gyung-Ho, Itai Sened, Yael Shomer, with Yanai Sened. 2008. “Two Decades of Israeli Legislative Politics: 1988—2006.” Typescript: Washington University in Saint Louis. Laver, Michael and Norman Schofield. 1990. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted 1998. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lin, Tse Min, James Enelow, and Han Dorussen. 1999. “Equilibrium in Multicandidate Probabilistic Spatial Voting.” Public Choice 98 (January): 59–82. McKelvey, Richard D. and John W. Patty. 2006. “A Theory of Voting in Large Elections.” Games and Economic Behavior 57 (October): 155–180. Milburn, John. 2006. “Former GOP Chairman Parkinson Switches Affiliation to Democrat.” Kansas City Star, May 30. Miller, Gary and Norman Schofield. 2003. “Activists and Partisan Realignment in the U.S.” American Political Science Review 97 (May): 245–260. ——— 2008. “The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.” Perspectives on Politics 6 (3): 433–450. Poole, Keith and Howard Rosenthal. 1984. “U.S. Presidential Elections 1968– 1980: A Spatial Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 28 (May): 283–312. Schofield, Norman. 1999. “The Heart and the Uncovered Set.” Journal of Economics Suppl. 8: 79–113. ——— 2006. Equilibria in the Spatial Stochastic Model with Party Activists. Review of Economic Design 10 (December): 183–203. ——— 2007. “The Mean Voter Theorem: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Convergent Equilibrium.” Review of Economic Studies 74 (July): 965–980. ——— 2008. The Spatial Model of Politics. London: Routledge. Schofield, Norman and Gary Miller. 2007. “Elections and Activist Coalitions in the United States.” American Journal of Political Science 51 (July): 518–531. Schofield, Norman and Itai Sened. 2006. Multiparty Democracy: Elections and Legislative Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schofield, Norman, Gary Miller, and Andrew Martin. 2003. “Critical Elections and Political Realignments in the USA: 1860–2000.” Political Studies 51 (June): 217–240. Stokes, Donald. 1963. “Spatial Models of Party Competition.” American Political Science Review 57 (June): 368–377. ———. 1992. “Valence Politics.” In Electoral Politics, ed. Dennis Kavanagh. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Westen, Drew. 2007. The Political Brain. New York: Perseus Books.


4 Party Switching and the Procedural Party Agenda in the US House of Representatives* Timothy P. Nokken

4.1 Introduction: Party Defection in the US Congress 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).1 The observed dynamic of party defection among members of Congress (MCs) in the United States stands in marked contrast to switching in a number of other countries. The most obvious difference concerns relative frequency: Party switching in the United States is far less common than in several other systems. For example, in

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the 1996–2001 Italian Chamber, nearly one-fourth of all legislators jumped parties at least once and total switches numbered 277; and in the 1993–1995 Russian Duma, nearly one-third of all legislators switched at least once, for a total of 342 switches (Mershon and Shvetsova 2008). Thames (2007) reports a total of 527 switches in the Ukranian Rada from 1998 to 2002. The contrast with the United States is stark indeed: The number of party switches in each of the countries just cited, for a single legislative term lasting five years or less, exceeds the total number of congressional party switches over the entirety of American history (see Poole and Nokken 2004; for more cross-national comparisons, see the introduction and other chapters in this volume). The variation in the incidence of party switching influences the focus of scholarly research on switching. Where switching is frequent, scholars tend to ask why and when legislators switch parties (e.g., Castle and Fett 1996, 2000; Desposato 2006; Heller and Mershon 2005; King and Benjamin 1986; Thames 2007). The best predictive model of party defection in the United States, on the other hand, is a naïve model that predicts no one switches parties.2 Nonetheless, the premise of this study is that, while the act of switching parties in US history is rare, the set of party defectors serves as an analytically useful group of legislators with which to investigate how congressional party affiliation constrains member behavior. Precisely because the vast majority of members retain a single party label throughout their careers, scrutiny of switchers affords evaluation of how changing party affiliation influences behavior. Hence, a common approach to studying party switching in the American context is to use a quasi-experimental research design to assess the behavioral consequences of party switching, conducting two sorts of comparisons. The first comparison, across time, examines pre- and post-switch roll-call behavior for individual party defectors. The second, across MCs, juxtaposes the roll-call behavior of party switchers with that of members who do not change parties. The theoretical motivation for such analyses is that party affiliation is one of the primary factors that shapes the roll-call behavior of MCs. Parties often provide clearly defined positions for their members within particular policy areas, thereby placing constraints on the positions their members can credibly take and still assert status as a loyal Democrat or Republican. If party affiliation does constrain the voting behavior of MCs, then significant shifts in behavior should be more likely among party defectors than among those who do not change parties.

Party Switching and the US House Agenda

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I exploit a natural experimental design to discern how party affiliation influences roll-call behavior. I use the DW-NOMINATE scaling procedure to calculate MCs’ ideal points on final passage, amendment, and procedural votes from 1953 to 2002 (83rd to 107th Congresses). I then utilize a technique implemented by Poole (2005), Goodman (2004), and Nokken and Poole (2004) to evaluate the magnitude and direction of ideological change in the voting behavior of party defectors. By distinguishing among three categories of vote types, I am able to ascertain whether the aggregate roll-call measures typically used to evaluate the behavioral implications of party defection mask changes within important subsets of roll calls. More specifically, some switchers may not exhibit dramatic behavioral changes on final passage votes in an effort to protect their ideological reputation among voters. They may, however, be more likely to exhibit notable changes in the less visible, but highly partisan, procedural and amendment votes. The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section, I discuss previous works investigating party defection in the United States, and develop several hypotheses regarding party switching and rollcall behavior. The third section describes the natural experimental research design I use to analyze the behavioral consequences associated with party switching and also addresses the scaling of voting behavior and categories of votes. The fourth section reports evidence on the effects of switching, examining both aggregate vote scores and voting behavior for three categories of votes. The fifth section concludes the chapter.

4.2 Rare Bird Sightings: Analyzing Party Defection in the US Congress 4.2.1 Two Paths in Analyzing Party Switching in the United States In the study of congressional party defection, scholars generally take one of two paths. The first path analyzes the act of switching itself and seeks to isolate the factors that lead individuals to switch parties. The varying electoral fortunes of the parties, for instance, may induce office holders to switch parties. Aldrich and Bianco (1992) derive a formal model to identify settings in which incumbent legislators may have strong electoral incentives to switch parties. They contend that party switching is best modeled in gametheoretic terms whereby individual-level decisions regarding party affiliation fundamentally depend on the decisions made by other

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players. 3 Grose and Yoshinaka (2003) devise an empirical test of the Aldrich and Bianco model, finding that MCs who switch parties face relatively stiff electoral competition and see a reduction in their vote share in both the primary and general elections following their change in party affiliations. Grose (2004) extends the analysis and investigates the electoral consequences for state legislators who switch parties. Turning to career trajectories within Congress, Yoshinaka (2005) finds that MCs who switch parties are relatively likely to be rewarded for their trip across the aisle, since switchers are more likely than nonswitchers to benefit from violations of seniority in committee assignments; the implication is that MCs who expect such benefits would be induced to switch. King and Benjamin (1986) identify the MCs who switched parties from 1789 to 1984 and conclude that switches tended to coincide with such major changes in the macropolitical environment as military conflicts, economic conditions, and partisan control of key institutions. A member’s ideological position relative to the two parties also appears to influence the decision to switch. In particular, ideologically cross-pressured members—those at or near the liberal (conservative) end of the distribution of Republicans (Democrats) in the House or Senate—may find that they more closely resemble members of the other party, and switch parties to take advantage of the better ideological fit (Castle and Fett 1996, 2000). Recognizing the cross-pressures on many Southern Democrats, the Republican Party in the 1980s began actively recruiting Democratic office holders at all levels of government to join the Republicans (Canon 1992; Canon and Sousa 1992). The second broad category of inquiry focuses on the consequences that party switching has for roll-call behavior. The notion here is that studying the set of party switchers affords analytical leverage on the effects of party on roll-call behavior, and thus contributes to the “party versus preferences” debate. Traditionally, those studying congressional behavior have simply asserted that party affiliation in part has played a causal role in MCs’ voting behavior. By virtue of affiliating with a party, legislators could be led to support the party’s stated position despite possessing policy preferences that diverge from the rest of their party. Krehbiel (1993) offers a forceful challenge to that conventional wisdom, countering that individual-level policy preferences are the primary determinants of both roll-call voting behavior and party affiliation. In a nutshell, if an individual tends toward the conservative side of the ideological spectrum, he or she


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will likely affiliate with the Republican Party and cast roll-call votes that reflect both partisan and personal preferences. To prove the existence of significant partisan effects, one must be able to demonstrate that pressures emanating from partisanship, namely pressure from party leaders, cause MCs to support the party’s position on roll-call votes, even when doing so runs contrary to their own policy preferences (Krehbiel 1993). Nokken (2000) addresses the question of how party affiliation has influenced roll-call behavior by analyzing the voting behavior of the set of 20 MCs (16 House members, 4 Senators) who switched parties while in office from 1947 to 1997. Using member support scores on Democratic leadership and agenda votes (Cox and McCubbins 1993), he compares the pre- and post-switch behavior of defectors to determine whether they change their voting behavior and, if they do, whether the change took place gradually over time or transpired at the time of the switch. He also compares the voting behavior of switchers with that of a control group of “proximates”—members who have maintained their party affiliation, compiled roll-call records similar to those of switchers, and supported party leadership so as to generate leadership support scores within an interval of plus or minus five points of an individual switcher’s score during that switcher’s first term in Congress. He found that party switchers dramatically shift their voting behavior at the time they switch, and do so in a direction consistent with expectations: MCs who have left the Democratic Party to join the GOP have moved to the right, while Republicans who have become Democrats have shifted to the left. Furthermore, such shifts are limited to party defectors, with proximates showing no evidence of statistically significant changes. These changes in roll-call behavior among party switchers suggest that party affiliation carries with it a code of conduct. Strong incentives exist for compliance with such a code even in a newly entered party, since deviations from the party’s stated course may result in leadership sanctions (Cox and McCubbins 1993) or electoral punishment, especially in primaries (Brady and Schwartz 1990; Grose 2004; Grose and Yoshinaka 2003). Party switching does not, however, always lead to noticeable changes in roll-call behavior. To determine how individual-level behavior covaries with changes in party affiliation, Nokken and Poole (2004) treat each party switcher as if he or she were two distinct members, and calculate pre- and post-switch DW-NOMINATE scores.4 They find that instances of significant behavioral shifts resulting from party

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defection tend to be concentrated in eras of high levels of ideological polarization. Oppenheimer and Hatcher (2003) also analyze the rollcall behavior of switchers over a long span of time and arrive at similar conclusions. In addition, they conduct interviews with a number of switchers serving in Congress. The interviewers showed the members the change in NOMINATE scores pre- and post-switch, and then asked the members about the behavioral consequences of their party defection. A number of switchers asserted that they made no significant changes to their roll-call voting behavior, and that any observed shifts likely resulted from changing votes on procedural matters.5

4.2.2

Party Switching and Legislative Behavior: Hypotheses

Both sets of findings make sense. First, during polarized periods, switchers have no real options but to make dramatic changes in voting behavior if they are to fit in with their new party. On the flip side, instances of partisan overlap are especially likely during periods of low polarization, reflecting the presence of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans (cf. Krehbiel 1993, 239). During times of ideological overlap, members can switch parties without having to alter their behavior dramatically, because partisan labels do not closely map onto specific ideological predispositions. The era from World War II through the 1950s is a classic example of just such a setting, since it prominently featured the Conservative Coalition, the alliance of Southern Democrats (known as “Boll Weevils”) and Republicans who opposed the more liberal Northern wing of the Democratic Party on a number of roll-call votes. Most of the Southern Democrats of this era were conservatives whose ideology often resembled their Republican colleagues, but who remained Democrats because they could never win reelection in the Solid South by running on a Republican label. Second, MCs may go to great lengths to construct an ideological reputation among constituents (Dougan and Munger 1989). Variation from a well-defined vote history (Asher and Weisberg 1978) could increase the likelihood of electoral defeat (Lott and Bronars 1993). Consequently, members rationally could choose to maintain a consistent voting record on final passage votes regardless of party affiliation, reasoning that constituents would likely observe their decisions on final passage votes in particular and that their attempts to explain public flip-flops on policy could lead to electoral difficulties. Although one might well expect voting behavior on final passage measures to remain relatively stable for party switchers—especially


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during periods of intraparty heterogeneity—roll-call behavior within the other categories of votes might change more dramatically, as implied by the interview responses reported in Oppenheimer and Hatcher (2003). To constituents, party switchers continue to compile a consistent record on substantive policy proposals, the set of votes most salient to the electorate. It is less likely that constituents notice or care about members’ votes on procedural matters, even though such votes ultimately carry with them significant policy consequences. Although constituents may fail to observe changes on procedural votes, a switcher’s colleagues certainly will take note. Sinclair (1981, 406) quotes one member on the importance of procedural support for a Democratic budget resolution as follows: “ ‘If you’re going to vote no on final passage of the budget resolution, help us out at this point by voting no on . . . any other Republican substitute.’ And that argument seemed to hold with a lot of people that were willing to help us out by voting no on any Republican substitute, even if they were going to vote no on the [final] resolution.” Cox and McCubbins (2002; 2005) argue that the majority party leadership is able to control the legislative agenda so as to preserve majority party cohesion. Of particular interest is the notion that the majority can exert negative agenda control—that is, has the power to keep issues off the floor that would split the majority. The procedural votes accompanying major legislation form an important component of such potentially divisive issues. Consistent with the notion of negative agenda control, Cox and McCubbins find only a handful of instances in which legislation passed over the opposition of a majority of the majority party. Given the importance of the procedural aspects of negative agenda control, switchers of all stripes should make significant moves toward their new party on procedural matters. Thus, party switchers might enjoy the best of both worlds: they might please their colleagues in their new party with shifts on the more electorally innocuous procedural votes, while pleasing their constituents by maintaining a consistent voting record on final passage policy votes. The discussion thus far generates a series of testable hypotheses about the nature of party influence on roll-call behavior. The first and most general hypothesis is that if party labels provide substantively important signals about ideological type, then changes in party affiliation should lead to changes in roll-call voting behavior and in particular should align the MCs’ votes more closely with their new party. The underlying notion is that individual MCs’ party affiliation affects the content of roll-call voting behavior. Recognizing this, MCs who

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change party should also change their votes on roll calls. Switching, though, might not have a constant effect across the entire set of rollcall votes considered by MCs if the effect of party switching on voting behavior varies across different types of vote. I depart from most of the past work on the behavioral effects of party defection to determine how a change in party labels influences switchers’ voting behavior on specific categories of votes. The second hypothesis is that members should exhibit higher levels of party loyalty on procedural and amendment votes than on final passage votes. Moreover, precisely because of the greater loyalty on procedural and amendment votes, switchers should make a dramatic move across the ideological spectrum on procedural votes at the time they switch parties. As shown in the following text, my analyses allow me to determine whether switchers modified their roll-call behavior when they switched and whether changes are limited to MCs who switch from one party to another or extend to those MCs who trade independent status for a party label. The third hypothesis is that switchers’ votes on final passage should be relatively unlikely to exhibit significant changes, except during phases of polarization. If party affiliation is a key determinant of voting on procedural matters, then it is plausible that ideology is a key determinant also of policy votes. Party switching would thus carry with it policy-based behavioral changes that reflect the switcher’s new party label. Yet, one might expect such changes to be smaller than the changes observed with procedural votes, since final votes are relatively visible to the electorate. This behavior should vary over time, however. In particular, dramatic changes in policy-based final passage votes should appear during times of polarization, giving rise to the setting that fosters the components of conditional party government (Aldrich and Rohde 2000, 2001; Rohde 1991).

4.3 Party Effects and Party Switchers: Research Design To investigate how changes in party affiliation influence roll-call behavior, I identify the set of House party switchers from the 83rd to the 107th Congress (1953 to 2002). I use Rohde’s roll-call voting data set (2004) to classify roll calls into final passage, amendment, and procedural votes. I use a modified version of Poole’s DW-NOMINATE procedure to estimate ideal point coordinates for all House members


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for the three subsets of votes and thus parallel the aggregate-level analyses in Nokken and Poole (2004).6 I limit the analysis to House members from 1953 to 2002 for two reasons. First, the House, unlike the Senate, is a highly structured institution with a complex system of restrictive rules that require members to vote on a number of important procedural matters in the course of normal legislative operations. For example, for a bill to reach the floor of the House via “normal” procedures, the House must first adopt the rule issued by the Rules Committee that specifies the terms of debate and the number and types of amendments (if any) that will be allowed. Votes on rules are tremendously important for the majority party leadership because they help ease the passage of legislation the leadership prefers and erect barriers in the path of proposals it might oppose; these effects for the most part operate unheeded by constituents.7 The second reason concerns data availability. Rohde’s roll-call voting data set (2004) codes House votes by type from 1953 to 2002 (the 83rd 107th Congresses). Though somewhat limited as to time, the Rohde data set provides exhaustive and valuable categorizations of all House votes. For 1953 to 2002, table 4.1 lists a total of 25 instances of party switching involving 24 individuals.8 The direction of switching favored the Republicans: On 5 occasions Republicans became Democrats, and on 15, Democrats joined the Republicans; the remaining 5 cases involved switches to or from minor parties or Independent status. To be sure, switchers constitute a very small percentage of the total number of members who served in the House over this period. As stressed, however, the small number of observed switches is not problematic given my purpose of evaluating the behavioral implications associated with changes in party labels. After identifying the set of switchers, I use the Rohde data set to disaggregate roll calls into final passage votes, procedural votes, and amendment votes. Appendix A details the vote types included in each of the three categories.9 Figure 4.1 plots the total numbers of votes in each category, which vary markedly over time and evince a general upward trend.10 Of some concern is the relative paucity of amendment and procedural votes from the earlier congresses in my data. The 83rd to 91st Congresses all held less than 50 recorded roll calls on amendment votes.11 Starting in the 92nd Congress (1971), when the House implemented a rule allowing recorded votes in the Committee of the Whole, the number of roll calls on amendments increased sharply (Bach and Smith 1988).12 Overall, there are enough votes within each category to generate meaningful ideal point estimates.

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Table 4.1 House defectors and change in aggregate DW-NOMINATE scores, 1953–2004 Old Party

Congress Name

Party

85 86 89 92 93 93 93 94 96 97 97 97 98 100 100 101 104 104 104 104 104 106 106 106 107 108 108

REP IND. DEM DEM REP DEM IND. DEM REP REP DEM IND. DEM DEM DEM DEM DEM DEM DEM DEM DEM DEM DEM REP DEM DEM IND. DEM DEM

Dellay Alford Watson Reid Jarman Moakley Riegle Peyser Atkinson Foglietta Gramm Stump Ireland Grant Robinson Watkins Deal Hayes Laughlin Parker Tauzin Forbes Goode Martinez Goode Hall Alexander

New Party DWDWNOMINATE Congress Party NOMINATE 0.009 0.012 0.427 –0.225 0.280 –0.463 –0.459 –0.125 –0.016 –0.406 0.477 0.561 0.153 –0.166 0.013 –0.045 0.008 0.038 0.051 0.219 0.134 0.111 0.263 –0.123 0.671 0.109 –0.051

85 87 90 93 94 94 94 96 97 98 98 98 99 101 101 105 104 104 104 104 104 106 106 106 107 109 109

DEM DEM REP DEM REP DEM DEM DEM REP DEM REP REP REP REP REP REP REP REP REP REP REP DEM IND REP REP REP REP

–0.318 0.197 0.377 –0.432 0.251 –0.415 –0.399 –0.362 0.090 –0.499 0.602 0.714 0.433 0.232 0.284 0.395 0.381 0.365 0.510 0.438 0.350 –0.155 0.529 0.397 0.822 0.351 0.443

Note: Names in Boldface indicate those members who switched whose roll-call behavior shifted in the expected direction following their switch. Source: DW-NOMINATE data available at ftp://pooleandrosenthal.com/junkord/HL01108A1_ PRES.DAT

I utilize a procedure developed by Poole to compare the magnitude of a switcher’s change in voting behavior with the change demonstrated by a set of common members serving in the same Congresses. I thus determine whether the switcher exhibited larger variance in his or her DW-NOMINATE score than the nonswitchers. I do not detail the scaling procedure here, but point interested readers to Goodman (2004), Nokken and Poole (2004), and Poole (2005) for further discussion of the scaling methodology (see also note 4 above).

Party Switching and the US House Agenda 700

91

Final Passage Amendment

600

Total Votes

500 400 300 200

Procedural

100

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 10 0 10 1 10 2 10 3 10 4 10 5 10 6 10 7

0 Congress Figure 4.1

Total roll calls by vote types, 83rd to 107th Congresses.

4.4

The Effects of Party Switching

I first assess my hypotheses in the light of aggregate data, and then turn to more finely grained evidence. To anticipate the chief findings, the aggregate analysis confirms the established wisdom on the effects of switching, as expressed in the first hypothesis, and the disaggregated analysis supports the second and third hypotheses.

4.4.1. Switching and Aggregate Voting Scores For the aggregate view, consider table 4.1 once more, which registers, for every House switcher from 1953 to 2002, the last Congress in which the MC served with his or her original party label and DW-NOMINATE score from that Congress, along with the Congress in which he or she switched parties and the corresponding DW-NOMINATE score.13 According to the first hypothesis on the direction of changes in voting behavior, Democrats (Republicans) who leave to join the Republicans (Democrats) should move to the right (left). Indeed, as table 4.1 displays, all 22 switchers who moved from one major party to the other shifted in the direction of the party entered. The absolutely uniform behavior of those switching from

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one party to another indicates the purchase of the first hypothesis, which speaks specifically to the importance of party labels. Of the three MCs who switch directly from Independent status to a party label, only one votes more in line with the new party. Virgil Goode (VA), with two switches, is a case apart: If we ignore his service as an Independent and treat him as defecting directly from the Democrats to the Republicans, his voting confirms the first hypothesis, shifting notably to the right.14 Thus, table 4.1 illustrates that party defection generates significant behavioral changes at the time a member crosses the aisle, as previous research has shown (Nokken 2000; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001; Nokken and Poole 2004). Table 4.2 shows not only the direction but also the statistical significance of shifts in the voting behavior of party switchers (Nokken and Poole 2004). The rightmost column isolates those members whose votes shift in the expected direction (marked with a +). MCs whose names appear in boldface exhibit statistically significant behavioral changes. To identify such shifts, Nokken and Poole (2004) calculate the distance between a switcher’s pre- and post-switch first dimension DW-NOMINATE score. Next, they compare the magnitude of the switcher’s shift to the changes for all MCs serving in the two corresponding Congresses (the number available for comparison is arrayed to the right of the switcher’s name). Members are then rank-ordered by magnitude of change, and categorized as evincing a statistically significant change if the switcher’s behavioral shift was in the proper direction (as addressed in the last column) and if it placed him in the 95th percentile of all MCs serving with the switching MC (the penultimate column). To clarify, Dellay’s votes shift in the correct direction (to the left) as he moves from the Republicans to the Democrats. The magnitude of this change on the first dimension is greater than 100 percent of the other 351 members serving in the 2 congresses involved. Overall, these data on aggregate roll-call voting provide support for the first hypothesis. Fourteen of the 16 switchers whose votes realign in the expected direction exhibit statistically significant changes; neither of the two whose votes deviate from expectations show significant change. Yet the MCs claiming various degrees of independent status deserve a closer look. It is also important to probe more deeply into the sources of statistically significant voting changes among other switchers. Do MCs move across the aisle to adopt a new set of positions on matters of both procedure and substantive policy? Identifying whether behavioral shifts tend to take place across all roll-call votes or vary

Table 4.2 House defectors and the statistical significance of changes in aggregate voting, 1953–2002

Old Party Last Year 1957 1959 1965 1971 1973 1973 1973 1975 1979 1981 1981 1981 1983 1987 1987 1989 1995 1995 1995

Last Cong 85 86 89 92 93 93 93 94 96 97 97 97 98 100 100 101 104 104 104

New Party Party

Republican Ind. Democrat Democrat Republican Democrat Ind. Democrat Republican Republican Democrat Independent Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat Democrat

First Year 1957 1961 1967 1973 1975 1975 1975 1979 1981 1983 1983 1983 1985 1989 1989 1997 1995 1995 1995

First Cong 85 87 90 93 94 94 94 96 97 98 98 98 99 101 101 105 104 104 104

Party Democrat Democrat Republican Democrat Republican Democrat Democrat Democrat Republican Democrat Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican Republican

Switcher’s Name Dellay Alford Watson Reid Jarman Moakley Riegle Peyser Atkinson Foglietta Gramm Stump Ireland Grant Robinson Watkins Deal Hayes Laughlin

N Compared

Pct

Dir

351 369 359 361 339 339 339 292 354 351 351 351 390 395 395 168 360 360 360

100 23 77 99 9 41 99 100 89 89 99 89 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

+ 0 – + – 0 + + + 0 + + + + + + + + +

Continued

Table 4.2

Continued Old Party

Last Year 1995 1995 1999 1999 2001

Last Cong 104 104 106 106 107

New Party Party

Democrat Democrat Republican Democrat Independent

First Year 1995 1995 1999 1999 2002

First Cong 104 104 106 106 107

Party Republican Republican Democrat Independent Republican

Switcher’s Name

N Compared

Pct

Dir

360 360 0 0 0

99 100

+ +

Parker Tauzin Forbes Goode Goode

Note: Names appearing in Boldface exhibited significant behavioral changes in voting behavior following their party switch. Key to changes in direction (Dir): + Major party to major party switches, behavioral change in proper direction. – Major party to major party switch, behavioral change in wrong direction. 0 Switch to or from minor party. Source: Nokken and Poole (2004, 555).


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among specific subsets of votes will help clarify the role that party affiliation plays in both the legislative and the electoral arena.

4.4.2 Policy or Procedure? Sources of Behavioral Change among Party Switchers The conventional wisdom on the consequences of party defection in the recent past is that switchers dramatically change their roll-call behavior at the same time they change party labels. What has yet to be addressed is whether members make a wholesale change among all categories of votes or whether the changes are concentrated among a few types of roll calls. I tackle this question by analyzing MCs’ preand post-switch behavior for three important categories of roll-call votes: final passage votes, amendment votes, and procedural votes. The second hypothesis here holds that members may well be mindful of the risks associated with “flip-flopping” on important final passage votes but exhibit large behavioral changes in their votes on amendments and procedural matters. Indeed, the party leadership in the House often grants members the latitude to break from the party line on final passage votes in return for supporting the party’s position on important procedural and amendment votes. In other words, parties are effective at asserting discipline on those votes that precede final passage and that best characterize US legislative parties as procedural coalitions. I compare the roll-call behavior of party switchers with their nonswitching colleagues, using a modified version of the DW-NOMINATE scores on three sets of roll-call votes: final passage, amendment, and procedural votes. Given the findings so far, noticeable shifts across all types of votes are likely. That said, investigating the changes within the three subsets of votes is still revealing. As the second hypothesis suggests, switchers provide the analytic leverage to determine whether the parties are successful in guiding the voting behavior of their members on procedural matters, even if they are unable to convert them on substantive final passage votes. As figure 4.2 documents, levels of partisan polarization increased sharply from 1953 to 2002, allowing evaluation of the third hypothesis on the effect of polarizing forces on roll-call behavior (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2006; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006). In a first cut at evaluating changes in behavior across subsets of votes, figures 4.3–4.5 display the DW-NOMINATE scores on final passage, amendment, and procedural votes for the five MCs

1

Distance between the Parties

0.9 House

R = .93 0.8

0.7

Senate

0.6

0.5

18 7 18 9 8 18 3 8 18 7 9 18 1 9 18 5 9 19 9 0 19 3 0 19 7 1 19 1 1 19 5 1 19 9 2 19 3 2 19 7 3 19 1 3 19 5 3 19 9 4 19 3 4 19 7 5 19 1 5 19 5 5 19 9 6 19 3 6 19 7 7 19 1 7 19 5 7 19 9 8 19 3 8 19 7 9 19 1 9 19 5 9 20 9 03

0.4

Figure 4.2 Party polarization, 1879 to 2006, distance between parties on 1st DW-NOMINATE dimension. Source: http://voteview.com/Polarized_America.htm#POLITICALPOLARIZATION

Final Passage Vote DW-NOMINATE Scores

0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 Parker 0.1 0 −0.1

Deal

Hayes

Tauzin

Laughlin

−0.2 96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

104

105

106

107

Congress

Figure 4.3 DW-NOMINATE scores for 96th to 107th Congresses on final passage votes: 104th Congress party switchers.

0.6 Amendment Vote DW-NOMINATE Scores

Deal 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2

Parker Tauzin

0.1 0 −0.1

Laughlin

−0.2

Hayes

−0.3 96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

104

105

106

107

Congress

Figure 4.4 DW-NOMINATE scores for 96th to 107th Congresses on Amendment votes: 104th Congress party switchers.

Procedural Vote DW-NOMINATE Score

0.6

Deal

0.5 Parker

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

Tauzin

−0.1 Hayes

−0.2

Laughlin

−0.3 96

97

98

99

100 101 102 103 104 104 105 106 107 Congress

Figure 4.5 DW-NOMINATE scores for 96th to 107th Congresses on procedural votes: 104th Congress party switchers.

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who switched from the Democrats to Republicans during the 104th Congress (Billy Tuazin [LA], Jamie Hayes [LA], Nathan Deal [GA], Mike Parker [MS], and Greg Laughlin [TX]). The three plots show a nearly identical pattern across vote types. In accord with the partisan-based argument underlying the first hypothesis, each MC dramatically changes his roll-call voting behavior at the time he or she switches parties, with pronounced and positive increases in DW-NOMINATE scores expected of a Republican MC. This focus on the single Congress with the most switching from 1953 to 2002 yields suggestive preliminary evidence in support of the third hypothesis, since high levels of polarization prevailed during the 104th (Nokken and Poole, 2004). A fuller examination is needed, however. For a more thorough analysis of the voting behavior of party defectors, I compare their roll-call behavior with that of their colleagues who do not change party affiliation. My analysis of the changes in switchers’ DW-NOMINATE scores across the three subsets of votes mirrors closely that of Nokken and Poole’s (2004) of the aggregate scores, discussed earlier. For those MCs who switched between Congresses, I use the difference between the scores in the first Congress with the new party label and the last Congress with the old party label. For those who switched during the course of a Congress, I treat the individual as two distinct members and calculate the difference in the pre- and post-switch scores. To determine the relative magnitude of the changes in voting behavior for the switcher, I compute the difference for all other members who served with the member across the two Congresses. I then rank order the set of members and calculate the percentile score for each switcher for the three subsets of votes. Unlike Nokken and Poole (2004), I make no assertions about levels of significance but simply report the percentile for each switcher. Table 4.3 compares voting choices on final passage, amendment, and procedural votes. For each type of vote, the right column on voting behavior identifies those switchers who move in the “right” or “wrong” direction; those trading Democratic for Republican labels should move to the right, and those making the opposite switch should move left. As the table 4.3 details, of the 20 major party switchers, 17 move in the expected direction on final passage votes, 19 on amendment votes, and 18 on procedural votes. Whereas it is difficult to determine the “correct” direction of change for most MCs who switch to or from Independent status,

Table 4.3 House party defectors’ change in DW-NOMINATE scores, 1953–2002, for three categories of votes Old Party

Last Year

Last Cong

Old Party

1957 1959 1965 1971 1973 1973 1973 1975 1979 1981 1981 1981 1983 1987 1987 1989 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1999 1999 2000 2001

85 86 89 92 93 93 93 94 96 97 97 97 98 100 100 101 104 104 104 104 104 106 106 106 107

Rep Ind. Dem Dem Rep Dem Ind. Dem Rep Rep Dem Ind. Dem Dem Dem Dem Dem Dem Dem Dem Dem Dem Dem Rep Dem Dem Ind.

New Party

First Year Cong 1957 1961 1967 1973 1975 1975 1975 1979 1981 1983 1983 1983 1985 1989 1989 1997 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1999 1999 2000 2002

85 87 90 93 94 94 94 96 97 98 98 98 99 101 101 105 104 104 104 104 104 106 106 106 107

Vote Category Final

New Party

Switcher’s Name

Dem Dem Rep Dem Rep Dem Dem Dem Rep Dem Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Dem Ind Rep Rep

Dellay Alford Watson Reid Jarman Moakley Riegle Peyser Atkinson Foglietta Gramm Stump Ireland Grant Robinson Watkins Deal Hayes Laughlin Parker Tauzin Forbes Goode Martinez Goode

Key to changes in direction (Dir): + Major party to major party switches, behavioral change in proper direction. – Major party to major party switch, behavioral change in wrong direction. 0 Switch to or from minor party.

Amend

Procedure

N Compared

Pct

Dir

Pct

Dir

Pct

Dir

386 369 359 361 340 340 340 293 355 352 352 352 390 397 397 171 349 349 349 349 349 393 393 393 392

98 94 9 83 38 79 89 91 79 73 7 47 97 99 98 100 100 96 99 53 93 99 37 100 35

+ 0 + + – 0 – + + 0 – + + + + + + + + + + + 0 + 0

98 94 78 93 26 32 50 96 38 89 66 82 100 100 100 99 100 99 100 99 96 91 75 100 76

+ 0 + + + 0 – + + 0 + + + + + + + + + + + + 0 + 0

92 15 76 98 85 28 75 99 89 54 100 96 98 100 100 98 100 99 99 92 95 99 97 100 100

+ 0 – + – 0 + + + 0 + + + + + + + + + + + + 0 + 0

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Goode (D, I, and R, VA) is, once more, a case apart. Elected to the House as a Democrat in the 105th Congress, Goode defected and as an Independent caucused with the Republicans during the 106th Congress, and finally completed his partisan migration by joining the Republicans in the 107th Congress. The expectation would be that Goode should move to the right. Indeed, adoption of Independent status led Goode to compile more conservative voting records in all three categories of votes. His subsequent shift to the Republican Party saw him continue his rightward moves on final passage and procedural votes, understandably so since formal affiliation with the Republican Party made him eligible for party-controlled benefits and since strong evidence of party loyalty is an important prerequisite for career advancement. It is noteworthy that Goode received an assignment to the Appropriations Committee after officially affiliating with the Republican Party. I now turn to evaluating the magnitude of changes, using the percentile scores reported to the right of table 4.3 to compare switchers and nonswitchers. According to the second hypothesis, switchers should evince the largest changes on procedural and amendment votes. I first count switchers for whom a majority of nonswitchers exhibited larger changes in roll-call behavior across the two corresponding Congresses than did the switcher. On final passage votes, 6 of the 25 party switchers registered smaller changes than a majority of the nonswitching members; in particular, the voting records of Phil Gramm (D to R, TX) and Albert Watson (D to R, SC) placed them at the 7th and 9th percentile, respectively. This result is not a complete surprise since the last vestiges of the Conservative Coalition existed when Gramm and Watson joined the Republicans. On amendment votes, only 3 switchers fell below the 50 percent threshold: John Jarman (OK), John Moakley (MA), and Eugene Atkinson (PA). Only 2, Thomas Alford (AR) and John Moakley (MA), failed to exceed the 50 percent mark on procedural votes. Note that Alford and Moakley held Independent status before their switches. I next focus on switchers whose change in voting behavior placed them at or above the 90th percentile. On final passage votes, 12 of the 25 switchers placed at or above the 90th percentile, and the relevant figure was 15 on amendment votes and 18 on procedural votes. This finding conforms with the second hypothesis. Finally, I compare each switcher’s percentile rank on final passage votes with his ranks on amendment and procedural votes. For 10 cases, a member’s percentile ranks on one or both of the categories


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of amendment and procedural scores exceeded the rank for final passage votes. For two, switchers’ ranks were identical across categories. Near-identical percentiles appear for 10 switchers (in chronological order of switch, Dellay, Peyser, Ireland, Grant, Robinson, Watkins, Hayes, Laughlin, Tauzin, and Forbes). Only for three switchers (two of whom traded Independent status for party labels) do percentile ranks on final passage votes surpass their ranks on amendment and procedural votes. The evidence in favor of the second and the third hypotheses becomes even stronger when the timing of the (near-) identical voting behavior is considered. All but 2 of the 12 instances total of (near-) identical behavior occurred after the mid-1970s, when partisan polarization increased sharply. It is true that important changes in roll-call behavior associated with party defection take place on the less visible but still crucial procedural and amendment votes, as consistent with the second hypothesis and more generally with the notion of legislative parties as procedural coalitions. Moreover, in accord with the third hypothesis, the differences between the three categories of votes fade in phases of partisan polarization, as votes on final passage are aligned with party label.

4.5 Conclusions It is somewhat ironic that quantitative studies of party switchers in the United States focus squarely on the outliers in the data. My premise is that investigating these seemingly anomalous individuals is of theoretical interest to scholars of legislative politics. Despite the “small N” problem, the study of party switchers allows analysts of US politics to understand more fully how party labels and partisan structures within the legislative arena shape (or fail to shape) the behavior of individual MCs. Lacking individual-level variation on party affiliation makes it difficult to ascertain just how membership in a party may influence an individual. Even where switches are rare, they offer insight into broad questions in politics. Here I extend my previous work on the roll-call behavior of party switchers to probe more deeply into how roll-call behavior shifts when House members change parties. Extant research provides persuasive evidence that party switchers, especially those in recent times, have made significant changes to their roll-call behavior upon joining a new party. Given the tendency for individual MCs to stake out ideological turf and strive to maintain a consistent voting record,

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such dramatic changes are somewhat surprising. I seek to ascertain whether party switchers change their roll-call behavior across the board. Do they change their votes on substantive policy as much as on procedural matters? Are differences observed regardless of the degree of partisan polarization? By disaggregating roll-call votes into specific categories, I take a first step toward answering these questions. Although the switchers studied here exhibit sizable shifts in their voting behavior across all types of votes, changes on amendment and procedural votes often exceed those observed on final passage votes. Moreover, this tendency is most pronounced in phases of relatively low polarization. When polarization is high, greater similarities appear in switchers’ roll-call behavior on final, amendment, and passage votes. These results shed light on several major issues in legislative and party politics. Legislative scholars have focused on the construction of congressional agendas and the central role that rules and procedures play in agenda-setting in an effort to understand the importance of partisan institutions. Party coalitions seek to gain a majority in the House and, with majority status, seek to create and implement rules and procedures favorable to the majority. The parties engage in bitter fights because they realize that by controlling procedures, they gain an upper hand on substantive policy matters. Policy accomplishments thus depend on a cohesive majority on procedural matters. Scholars have noted the increasingly cohesive parties on procedural matters and illustrated that cohesion can be translated into partisan victories on policy matters (Aldrich and Rohde 2000; Cox and McCubbins 2002, 2005; Rohde 1991). If these are apt depictions and if US legislative parties are best characterized as procedural coalitions, parties may well start to welcome new members despite how those members vote on final passage as long as they lend their enthusiastic support to party procedural positions. The findings here are consistent with that perspective and show that investigating member behavior on amendment and procedural votes is a fruitful area of inquiry. Perhaps most broadly, the differences I have documented in representatives’ voting behavior across distinct categories of votes carry implications for the real-world workings of representation in US politics. Especially in periods of low partisan polarization, legislators who switch parties appeal to (perceived) continuities in their constituents’ policy preferences by maintaining continuity on final passage votes. Although this pattern fits nicely with the hoary assumption that


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politicians are reelection seekers, it also forces us to reevaluate our understanding of representation. If, as Cox and McCubbins (2005) argue, the heart of policy making lies not in final passage votes, but rather in procedural votes on rules and amendments (and, above all, legislative leadership), then the changes in party switchers’ behavior that I have demonstrated here could overwhelm the more easily observed continuities on final passage. Switching in the US Congress, rare as it is, carries important consequences for the representation of the policy preferences of US voters. More generally, the disjunction in switchers’ behavior between final-passage and procedural votes lends credence to the claim that “party matters” even in the United States and invites taking MCs’ claims of independence with a healthy dose of skepticism.

4.6 Appendix A: Roll-Call Vote Types 4.6.1 Final Passage Amendments to the Constitution Final Passage/Adoption of a Bill Final Passage/Adoption of a Conference Report Final Passage/Adoption of a Bill Final Passage/Adoption of Conference Report Final Passage/Adoption of Resolution Final Passage/Adoption of Joint Resolution Passage/Adoption of a Bill under Suspension of the Rules Passage/Adoption of a Joint Resolution under Suspension of the Rules Final Passage/Adoption of Concurrent Resolution Passage/Adoption of a Concurrent Resolution under Suspension of the Rules Passage/Adoption of a Resolution under Suspension of the Rules Passage over Presidential Veto Adoption of First Part of Resolution Adoption of Second Part of Resolution Suspension of Rules for Conference Report Motion to Suspend the Rules and Concur

4.6.2

Amendment Votes

Straight Amendments (includes en bloc and amendments in the nature of a substitute) Amendments to Amendments

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Substitute (to an amendment) Motion to Table Amendment Amendment to Amendment to Substitute Perfecting Amendment Amendment to Substitute Perfecting Amendment to Substitute Suspension of Rules to Amend Bill Amendment to Special Rule

4.6.3 Procedural Votes Budget Waivers Motion to End Debate Motion to Rise from the Committee of the Whole Motion to Disagree Passage of Rules (Special Rule) Motion to Recede Motion to Order Previous Question (Note: Previous Question on Special Rule is 99) Election of Speaker Motion to Recommit (Note: Recommit to Conference is 72) Motion to Instruct Conferees Motion to Recede and Concur (also includes motion to concur) Previous Question on Special Rules Source: Rohde’s Vote Type Codebook (2004) for Rohde/PIPC Roll Call Database (83rd to 107th Congress).

4.7

Notes

* I would like to thank Mike Crespin, Maria Escobar-Lemmon, Chuck Finocchiaro, Craig Goodman, Keith Poole, Lucio Renno, and the Research Group on Legislative Party Switching for helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to acknowledge Keith Poole and David Rohde for providing data utilized in this chapter. Special thanks to Keith Poole for his generous help in calculating the DW-NOMINATE scores utilized in this analysis. I also want to recognize Carol Mershon and William Heller for their work in creating the Research Group on Legislative Party Switching and spurring me to think hard about placing party switching in the United States within a larger comparative framework. 1. Nokken and Poole (2004) define a party switch to include nearly any instance of a member adopting a new party label during three stable partisan eras in the House and Senate (1793–1813, 1827–1849, and 1877–1998). They use Martis’s (1989) party codes to identify all MCs whose party label changed


2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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over the course of their careers. Oppenheimer and Hatcher (2003) present an alternative list of switchers derived from the use of more restrictive definitions of switching. I acknowledge Brian Gaines for elucidating on this predictive model of party defection in the United States. Aldrich and Bianco argue that choices of party affiliation could be considered an additional component of the strategic politician theory developed by Jacobson and Kernell (1983). DW-NOMINATE scores are generated from an individual’s roll-call behavior by using a multidimensional scaling procedure. The scores range from –1, the most liberal value, to +1, the most conservative. For a member switching parties during a legislative session, we split the member’s roll-call record at the time the switch was announced, essentially treating him or her as a new MC upon changing parties. Procedural votes are especially important in the House of Representatives, as discussed in the following text. See Poole (2005) and Goodman (2004) for similar analyses of roll-call behavior in other settings. A number of scholars emphasize the importance of procedural matters in the House. See Sinclair (2007) on the majority party’s use of “unorthodox” procedures to pass legislation and both Roberts and Smith (2003) and Theriault (2007) on the contribution of procedural matters to the high levels of polarization in Congress. Virgil Goode (VA) switched twice, as reported. Two MCs appear in table 4.1 but are not counted in the totals just cited: Ralph Hall (TX) and Rodney Alexander (LA) both switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in the 108th. These switches came too late to allow the calculation of subsetspecific DW-NOMINATE scores. My decisions on which vote types to assign to the respective categories essentially mirror those of Crespin, Rohde, and Vander Wielen (2002). The mean number of final passage votes was just more than 308, with a minimum of 73 and maximum of 629. Amendment votes ranged from 10 to 590 and averaged just more than 243, whereas procedural votes ranged from 39 to 259 and averaged just more than 138. Generating ideal point estimates for the early congresses with such a small number of votes may well produce scores with large standard errors, hence, questionable precision (personal communication with Keith Poole). The explosion of recorded votes in the Committee of the Whole helped trigger the Rules Committee’s effort to use creative rules so as to regain control of the amendment process in the Committee of the Whole. The data are available at http://www.voteview.com/dwnomin.htm, file HL01108A1_PRES.DAT. It is reasonable to characterize Goode’s switch as a straight move from the Democrats to the Republicans since he caucused with and received committee assignments from the Republicans while serving as an Independent.

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4.8 References Aldrich, John H., and William T. Bianco. 1992. “A Game-Theoretic Model of Party Affiliation of Candidates and Office Holders.” Journal of Mathematical and Computer Modelling 16: 103–116. Aldrich, John H., and David W. Rohde. 2000. “The Consequences of Party Organization in the House: The Role of the Majority and Minority Parties in Conditional Party Government.” In Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, Ed. Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher. Washington, DC: CQ Press. ———. 2001. “The Logic of Conditional Party Government: Revisiting the Electoral Connection.” In Congress Reconsidered, 7th Edition, ed. Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Asher, Herbert B., and Herbert F Weisberg. 1978. “Voting Change in Congress: Some Dynamic Perspectives on an Evolutionary Process.” American Journal of Political Science 22 (May): 391–425. Bach, Stanley, and Steven S. Smith. 1988. Managing Uncertainty in the House of Representatives: Adaptation and Innovation in Special Rules. Washington, DC: Brookings. Brady, David, and Edward P. Schwartz. 1990. “Ideology and Interests in Congressional Voting: The Politics of Abortion and the U.S. Senate.” Public Choice 84 (July): 25–48. Canon, David T. 1992. “The Emergence of the Republican Party in the South, 1964–1988.” In The Atomistic Congress: An Interpretation of Congressional Change, ed. Allen D. Hertzke and Ronald M. Peters, Jr. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Canon, David T., and David J. Sousa. 1992. “Party System Change and Political Structures in the U.S. Congress.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 17: 347–363. Castle, David, and Patrick Fett. 1996. “A Predictive Model of Congressional Party Switching.” Manuscript. Beaumont, TX: Lamar University. ———. 2000. “Member Goals and Party Switching in the US Congress.” In Congress on Display, Congress at Work, ed. William T. Bianco. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. 1993. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2002. “Agenda Power in the US House of Representatives, 1877–1986.” In Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress, ed. David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Crespin, Michael H., David W. Rohde, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen. 2002. “Variations in Party Voting in the House of Representatives, 1953–2000.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Southern Political Science Association, Savannah, GA.


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Desposato, Scott. 2006. “Parties for Rent? Careerism, Ideology, and Party Switching in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (1): 62–80. Dougan, William R., and Michael Munger. 1989. “The Rationality of Ideology.” Journal of Law and Economics 32 (April): 119–142. Fiorina, Morris P., Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope. 2006. Culture War? The Myth of Polarized America. New York: Pearson Longman. Goodman, Craig. 2004. Ideological Stability in Congress: Experiments in Roll Call Voting. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Houston. Grose, Christian R. 2004. “Is It Better to Join the Majority? The Electoral Effects of Party Switching by Southern State Legislators, 1972–2000.” American Review of Politics 25: 79–98. Grose, Christian R., and Antoine Yoshinaka. 2003. “The Electoral Consequences of Party Switching by Incumbent Members of Congress, 1947–2000.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 28 (February): 55–75. Heller, William B., and Carol Mershon. 2005. “Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996–2001.” Journal of Politics 67 (May): 536–559. Jacobson, Gary C., and Samuel Kernell. 1983. Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections, 2nd Ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. King, Gary, and Gerald Benjamin. 1986. “The Stability of Party Identification among US Representatives: Political Loyalty, 1789–1984.” Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Convention. Krehbiel, Keith. 1993. “Where’s the Party?” British Journal of Political Science 23 (April): 235–266. Lott, John R., Jr., and Stephen G. Bronars. 1993. “Time Series Evidence on Shirking in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Public Choice 76 (June): 125–150. Martis, Kenneth C. 1989. The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress 1789–1989. New York: Macmillan. McCarty, Nolan M., Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. 2001. “The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress.” American Political Science Review 95 (September): 673–687. ———. 2006. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mershon, Carol, and Olga Shvetsova. 2008. “Parliamentary Cycles and Party Switching in Legislatures.” Comparative Political Studies 41 (1): 99–127. Nokken, Timothy P. 2000. “Dynamics of Congressional Loyalty: Party Defection and Roll Call Behavior, 1947–1997.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 25 (August): 417–444. Nokken, Timothy P., and Keith T. Poole. 2004. “Congressional Party Defection in American History.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 29 (November): 545–568. Oppenheimer, Bruce I., and Andrea C. Hatcher. 2003. “Congressional Party Switchers, 1876–2002: The Effect of Party and Constituency on Strategic Behavior.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 3–6, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL. Poole, Keith T. 2005. Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Roberts, Jason M., and Steven S. Smith. 2003. “Procedural Contexts, Party Strategy, and Conditional Party Voting in the US House of Representatives, 1971–2000.” American Journal of Political Science 47 (April): 305–317. Rohde, David W. 1991. Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. Roll Call Voting Data for the United States House of Representatives, 1953–2002. East Lansing: Compiled by the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program, Michigan State University. Sinclair, Barbara. 1981. “The Speaker’s Task Force in the Post-Reform House.” American Political Science Review 75 (June): 397–410. ———. 2007. Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the U.S. Congress. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Thames, Frank C. 2007. “Searching for the Electoral Connection: Parliamentary Party Switching in the Ukrainian Rada, 1998–2002.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 32 (May): 223–256. Theriault, Sean M. 2007. “Procedural Polarization in the US Congress.” Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas. Wattenberg, Martin P. 1994. “Dealignment in the American Electorate.” In Parties and Politics in American History: A Reader, ed. L. Sandy Maisel and William G. Shade. New York: Garland. ———. 1998. The Decline of American Political Parties, 6th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yoshinaka, Antoine. 2005. “House Party Switchers and Committee Assignments: Who Gets ‘What, When, How?’ ” Legislative Studies Quarterly 30 (August): 391–406.

5 Party Switching in Brazil: Causes, Effects, and Representation Scott Desposato

5.1 Introduction Brazil has a long history of frequent party switching by sitting legislators. Although there are other countries with higher rates of switching, most are transitioning democracies with evolving party systems. In such contexts, switching goes hand in hand with less-developed party brands, weaker voter partisan attachments, and evolving norms and procedures of recruitment and hierarchy. The Brazilian case appears to represent a stable long-term equilibrium, with fairly steady rates of switching over the last 20 years: approximately one-third of deputies have switched in each legislature since democratization. Table 5.1 shows switching rates in the last several legislatures. During the 49th legislature (1991–1994), there were 262 incidents of switching, for an average switching rate of .52 per legislator-term. That figure slips slightly to .41 in the second period, and rises to .51 in the third.1 Switching was prohibited for most of Brazil’s authoritarian period (1964–1985), but scholars of previous periods have noted high rates of switching in the 1960s and even as far back as the 1800s (Graham, 1990): Switching apparently was common during the Second Republic (1946–1964), and there is evidence as well of frequent switching during the First Republic (1889–1930). As in the other country cases discussed in this volume, switching in Brazil is not viewed favorably by citizens, pundits, or scholars. Observers decry the lack of backbone or consistency in switchers, and look with envy at highly disciplined stable systems. More fundamentally, switching potentially jeopardizes accountability and representation. Voters may support a candidate based on his party label or coalition membership—switching to another party appears a

110 Table 5.1

Scott Desposato Party switching rates in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies Legislative Session

Number of Switches Switching Rate Number of Switchers

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212 .41 169

262 .51 183

135 .54* 130

* current term, projected rate.

complete betrayal of the electoral compact between voter and elected official. Further, these potential problems are exacerbated in a system with vote-pooling, such as Brazil’s. Under vote pooling, a vote for one candidate may help elect another on the list, who may then switch party. Without reliable information about party membership, how can votes have any meaning? In this chapter, I explore the causes and effects of party switching in Brazil. To tackle the first question, I offer a general model of why party switching may take place, discuss implications for Brazil, and test it empirically using data from two legislative sessions. For the second question, I examine the impact of party switching on party cohesion, legislators’ voting behavior, and representation. I conclude by examining the impact of recent developments, most notably a supreme court ban on party switching imposed in March 2007.

5.2 Causes of Party Switching Why switch party? I aim not only to answer this question for the Brazilian case, but also to offer a generalizable model that can capture different kinds of payoffs to membership, different kinds of party structure, and endogenous party leadership decisions. My approach is similar to the models adopted in other studies of party switching, but has one important difference. Most work reduces switching to a fundamentally binary decision—the choice to switch or not to switch. This approach implies a logit or probit empirical model. I adopt a multichoice modeling strategy, examining the specific choice of party destination—not just the decision to switch or not. 2 In multiparty systems, switchers may join any of many alternative parties, and not all destinations are the same. To fully

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understand the motives behind a switch, I argue that we cannot just look at a binary choice set of switch or not switch. Much of a switcher’s calculus is about the potential payoffs of changing party, and some of those payoffs are specific to destinations. For example, consider a study of the role of pork in party switching. If we were modeling binary switching, we might observe higher switching rates out of opposition than government parties. This appears to be evidence that pork matters for party affiliation. However, if we did not know which party switchers joined, we would not fully understand their motives. For instance, if all switchers simply move from one opposition party to another, that would be evidence that belonging to the governing coalition is not important—or that the governing coalition does not accept switchers. The key point is that we should not just model the binary decision to switch or not switch in multiparty systems. Instead, we must model the full set of alternative choices and their associated payoffs to understand actors’ incentives. A Typology of Party Systems To begin, I propose conceptualizing legislative party systems according to the nature of the benefits that party membership provides and the extent to which parties control access to such benefits, as summarized in table 5.2. The benefits of party membership may be classified either as private or as club goods. Private goods are both rival and exclusive, meaning that their consumption reduces the amount of that good available to others, and others can be excluded from enjoying the same good. Examples in legislatures often include pork, committee assignments, and nominations for elected office. Club goods fall between private and public goods. They are nonexclusive only for club members, all of whom automatically enjoy equal access. For example, one club good is the electoral value of a party label. All members automatically enjoy (or suffer) a party’s reputation or performance in government.3 Table 5.2

Typologies of legislative party systems Payoff Club

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I III

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The second dimension of my typology is the extent to which political parties control access to the benefits of membership. In the case of private goods benefits, a party might make all decisions about distribution. For example, in most closed-list systems, ballot positions for upcoming elections may be considered a private good controlled by the party leaders. In other systems, private goods need not be controlled by parties. For instance, nominations in the United States are still effectively private goods but are controlled by voters in primary elections, not party leaders. With club goods, parties cannot restrict members’ enjoyment of benefits. Again, all members enjoy a party’s brand name or reputation. Parties do control possession of club goods, however, when they can restrict membership to a subset of legislators, repelling or expelling unwelcome members. The framework proposed by Aldrich and Bianco (1992) is a special case of type II, where politicians compete in a single-member district for a private good (a nomination or seat) without any interference from party leaders. Legislators switch party to maximize their expected career utility, a function of the resources they receive from their party of choice, less a switching transaction cost. Transaction costs can take many forms, codified in law or imposed by informal institutions. For example, Nepal, Ecuador, and Japan have passed laws whereby party switchers are expelled from office, losing their mandates.4 Alternatively, transaction costs can be imposed by voters. Where the electorate or party militants are very partisan or otherwise use parties as information cues, but voters can influence the choice of candidate, switchers will usually have little credibility and great difficulty attracting votes or campaign support. Parties will offer resources and invite switchers when the benefits of welcoming a new member exceed the costs of resources offered. The value of a new member will vary greatly across systems, depending on political institutions and voters’ characteristics, but at least two benefits to accepting new members are obvious. First, in all legislatures, size matters. On average, larger parties have more political influence, more cabinet positions, better committee assignments, and more pork. The relationship between size and resources may occasionally be linear, when resources are distributed proportionately. In such a case, each additional member brings equal value in party resources. But in winner-take-all systems and multiparty coalition governments, the value of an additional member depends on whether he or she changes the balance of power. Second, switchers may bring with them electoral support for their new party. Especially popular


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politicians, often celebrities, may significantly increase a party’s vote share. Such a benefit, however, depends on the electoral context. Voting must be personalistic enough that voters will continue to vote for a switcher and the electoral system must pool votes, so that other party members will directly benefit from the influx of popular support (on pooling, see, e.g., Carey and Shugart [1995]). Formalizing the Model When formalized, this logic makes predictions about the patterns and frequency of switching across systems. I illustrate with a simple model, following Aldrich and Bianco (1992). Let a legislature have two parties, A and B, and two legislators, 1 and 2. Legislator 1 starts in party A; legislator 2 starts in party B. Each legislator has an additional exogenous characteristic, gi, that is their contribution or value-added to a club good of the party they join. For example, a very popular politician might bring votes to a new party. The contribution gi need not be positive; a scandal-ridden legislator might have a negative value-added in a party. Parties have exogenous resource endowments uj and endogenous resource endowments f(Gj). Whereas uj may be a private or club good, f(Gj) is a club good enjoyed by all members. The latter’s value is determined by f, a strictly increasing function, and Gj, the sum of the gi of all members of party j: Gj = ∑gij. When possible, parties exercise control over access to resources by restricting membership. Specifically, members of each party cast simultaneous votes to determine which legislators will be allowed to join or stay, and which will be refused admission. Party members—themselves legislators in my model—cast these votes to maximize their own expected payoffs. Legislators switch party or stay put to maximize their expected utility, a function of the resources they will receive in their party of choice, less any transaction costs. Legislator i’s utility associated with membership in party j is: uij = αijuj + f(Gj) − TiIj≠home where uj is party j’s resources, αij is legislator i’s share of party j’s resources, f(Gj) is the value of the public good contribution of all party members to party j, Ti is a transaction cost, and Ij≠home is an indicator variable coded “1” if party j is not i’s current party, “0” otherwise. The precise form that payoffs and f(Gj) takes will vary with

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the specific goods that contribute to parties’ value for and contributions to legislators, and legislators’ value-added for parties. The game is played as follows: 1. If parties have control over membership, they simultaneously decide whether to accept or reject each legislator i via majority vote of current members. 2. Legislators make membership decisions—switching or staying put— and receive payoffs. 3. The game ends.

For the simple case with one legislator per party, the payoffs of membership for each legislator are summarized in table 5.3. Legislators start in the upper-right hand cell: (A, B). Note that where parties have control over access, a decision to reject a member eliminates that legislator’s options. For example, if Party A, controlled by legislator 1, decides to exclude legislator 2, the first column from table 5.3 is eliminated, and the game is reduced to legislator 1 choosing between Party A and Party B. Virtually, any standard game can emerge from combinations of parameter values, functional forms, and levels of party control. When legislators can freely join any party, that is, parties cannot restrict access, the most common results include the following: • Nobody Move: When T is big, both legislators stay put in their current party. • All Aboard!: When the payoff differential |uA − uB | is big enough, both legislators join the resource-rich party. • Battle of the Sexes: When f(g 1 + g 2) is big enough and all gi positive, both legislators want to be in the same party, but each prefers that the other switch and pay the transaction cost Ti. Similarly, when u is a private good or both gi are less than zero, that is, each legislator has a negative value-added, legislators may play BOTS (call this variant BOTS2) but prefer to be in opposite parties. • Fashion: One legislator prefers to share a party with the other, but the other prefers to be alone. This result emerges when one legislator has a sufficiently large positive gi and the other a sufficiently negative one, and leads to mixed-strategy equilibrium. • Get out! Without party control, a legislator with a negative gi , starting in a resource-poor party, could join the other party and force the other legislator to abandon ship. The first legislator could then keep all the resources of the wealthy party for himself or herself.

Party Switching in Brazil Table 5.3

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Payoffs of party membership Legislator 2

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α1AuA + f(g 1, g 2), α2AuA + f(g 1, g 2) − T uB − T + f(g 1), uA − T + f(g 2)

uA + f(g 1), uB + f(g 2) α1BuB + f (g 1, g 2) − T, α2BuB + f(g 1, g 2)

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In the case where parties can reject new members, the range of parameters that lead to switching equilibria is much smaller, and some are eliminated entirely. For example, for BOTS2, Fashion, and Get Out!, the resource-rich party will simply reject unwanted new members.5

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Figures 5.1 to 5.4 show predicted equilibria for different types of goods u, different degrees of party control, and different values of T and gi, with α = 1 for club goods and ␣ = n1j for private goods, where nj is the number of members of party j. Each of the four figures corresponds to one of the ideal system types of table 5.2. Within each figure, the four plots show equilibria for different values of T and G, as labeled. Combinations of uA and uB that lead to All Aboard! are black, those u that lead to Nobody Move are white, and u that lead to mixed or other switching equilibria are grey. Thus systems with switching have large shaded regions; systems where switching is rare have large blank regions. Code to produce similar graphs and calculate payoffs for different types of goods and values of all parameters is available on my Web site (http://swd.ucsd.edu).

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Comparing the figures generates predictions about the conditions under which we will observe party switching, and the direction of such switching. The most important of these predictions include: • Increasing transaction costs decreases switching. Within all of the figures, moving from T = 0 to T = 2 significantly reduces switching. For example, in figure 5.1, compare plot I with II. In I, there is always unconstrained switching. In the plot immediately below that one, the range of u that leads to switching falls to 64 percent. A similar vertical comparison of plots in almost all figures yields different percentage changes, but identical results—the range of u that leads to switching falls in every case. • Increasing resource differentials |uA − uB | leads to All Aboard! Both legislators join the well-endowed party, with important qualifications. Without party control, increasing party resource differentials lead to switching as legislators play All Aboard or other strategies, for both

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kinds of goods. The range of u that leads to switching is much larger for club goods than for private goods, because club goods are nonrival. With party control and club goods, the impact of resource differentials is unchanged. An important exception arises with party control and private goods. In this scenario, all switching is less likely as party resource differentials increase. When parties control valuable private goods, they will not share them unless a new member brings a gi that exceeds the cost of sharing. In ␪ the simple illustration, parties only accept switcher i when gi > 2j ⋅ • Negative gi decrease switching; positive gi increase switching. Where parties control access and gi is positive, party j will accept new ␪ member i, except when uj is a private good and 2j > gi . But where gi is negative, parties will always exclude that member if they can. Where parties cannot restrict membership, a negative gi reduces the range of All Aboard! and increases the ranges of mixed-strategy and other equilibria discussed earlier. Plot III: T=0, G=(1,–1) 5

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Adding more legislators and more parties increases the complexity of the model considerably, but the basic implications remain unchanged. How Does It Work in Brazil? In many ways, Brazil fits all the prerequisites for relative frequent party switching. There are relatively low transaction costs, payoffs that are either club goods or uncontrolled private goods, large resource differentials, and positive value-added for most legislators. Effectively, most Brazilian deputies fall somewhere in figures 5.1 and 5.3, Plots I and II. The parameters of the system create and structure many opportunities for defection from parties. I turn now to consider the specifics of the Brazilian case and the incentives for party-switching. Transaction Costs Until recently, transaction costs were manageably low for many Brazilian legislators. The legal environment was very accommodating: there were no legal prohibitions on party switching, except immediately before elections for those seeking reelection.6 Until recently, all incumbents were guaranteed renomination in the next election under the candidato nato or “birthright” rule.7 Further, personalistic voting means that switchers can take their voters with them. Partisanship in Brazil is relatively low (Samuels, 2006), and most switchers I interviewed expected no or little repercussions in terms of electoral support. Many seemed to think that voters simply did not care about party membership. In one interview, the legislator’s receptionist was not even aware that he had switched parties! Some legislators, however, face significant transaction costs for switching. A few Brazilian parties have aggressively cultivated partisan followings, building grassroots organizations, promoting cohesive policy platforms, and encouraging partisan, not personal, votes in campaigns. Most notable of these is the Workers’ Party, or PT, but some smaller parties (including the Green Party) also have more ideological popular followings (Ames, 2001; Keck, 1995; Mainwaring, 1999; Samuels, 2006). And even catch-all parties may have a few committed partisan supporters. Legislators with such constituencies cannot take their voters with them when changing party—and should be much more likely to stay put. Benefits of Party Membership Brazilian parties can facilitate access to pork, provide ideological or policy benefits, and can directly enhance electoral success. One of the

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unique features of the Brazilian system is that the primary benefits of party membership are either club goods or uncontrolled private goods, facilitating a fluid party system. I discuss the nature of benefits and parties’ role in their distribution in what follows. Pork A major benefit of party membership is privileged access to state resources. In the case of Brazil, scholars have widely acknowledged the importance of state resource distribution for deputies’ careers (Abrúcio, 1998; Ames, 2001, 1995a, b; Leal, 1977; Mainwaring, 1997, 1999; Pereira and Mueller, 2004; Samuels, 2003). Government resources can be channeled into pork projects that provide lucrative construction contracts and needed infrastructure. Cushy jobs in the bureaucracy reward campaign workers and maintain politicians’ support networks for the next election. Resources might also be used in less legal ways—for direct campaign activities or even vote-buying. Public resource distribution is controlled by the executive branch, not political parties. For legislators, access to public funds and resources is maximized by joining the governing coalition and voting for the executive’s proposals. Brazilian Presidents typically use state resource distribution to build multiparty supermajority coalitions. Supermajorities are required because legislators, even in the governing parties, are hesitant to support controversial economic reforms that impose significant costs on their constituents.8 Finally, there are stark differentials in access to resources across parties. Legislators in opposition parties are unlikely to receive any government projects for their constituents. Two empirical implications follow. First, government parties should retain and attract members, given large resource differentials and open markets for votes and pork. Second, since pork is a rival good, governing parties’ attractiveness may decline as the coalition grows large, and the spoils are widely shared. A similar logic applies to subnational coalitions. Brazil’s decentralized federalism grants subnational political actors—especially state governors—control over resources that national legislators covet (Abrucio, 1998; Mainwaring, 1999; Samuels, 2003). State governors’ influence should only be enhanced by progressive ambition in Brazil. Many national deputies aspire to state and local elected and appointed positions. Governors directly control key state appointments and can facilitate election to subnational office by providing campaign resources, endorsements, and selective pork distribution.


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Consequently, governismo—a tendency to join the governing coalition to enhance resource access—ought to extend to subnational governments, making state governors’ parties more attractive than state opposition parties. Electoral Payoffs Brazilian parties play a limited, but important, role in elections. In many political systems, parties provide many electoral resources: campaign workers, financing, consulting services, and meaningful labels to cue voters. By contrast, most Brazilian parties play little or no active role in legislative campaigns—parties do not provide candidates with volunteers, campaign finance, or consulting services, all resources that candidates must generate on their own. Voters generally do not use party labels as information cues; most citizens cast votes based on candidates’ reputations, not based on their partisanship (Mainwaring, 1999, 122). But party membership still can have an important effect on electoral outcomes. A feature of the Brazilian electoral system, open-list proportional representation (OLPR), makes election easier in some parties than in others and affects legislators’ affiliation incentives.9 The OLPR vote-pooling mechanisms allow the minimum number of votes required for election to vary across party and state. For example, a single, very popular candidate could draw millions of votes, earning several seats for their party. Because of vote pooling, his or her extra votes could make election easier for other candidates within their party. Consequently, legislators have incentives to switch party to take advantage of easier electoral quotas. Parties where election is easier should retain members; parties where election requires more votes should lose members. This should vary with legislators’ own electoral strength. Marginal legislators should be concerned about their party’s electoral quotient. Politicians that barely passed the electoral threshold should seek another party where they could be elected with a safer margin. At the other extreme, strong vote-getters do not need to pay any attention to quotients; their election would be assured in any party. In interviews, legislators have described these calculations: comparing their own expected vote share with the electoral quotient in each party, and switching to enhance reelection prospects. Electoral quotas are effectively uncontrolled club goods. Enjoying a party’s quota just requires joining the party. Ballots are unordered, so legislators do not compete for list position. And every party has a surplus of nominations: parties can nominate more candidates than

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there are seats in every district, and yet rarely find enough willing candidates. Consequently, legislators should adopt membership strategies to take advantage of party quota differentials. Ideological Payoffs A third component of party affiliation payoffs is ideological. Membership in a party of like-minded legislators has several payoffs. Political parties can play an important role in helping like-minded legislators advance a policy agenda. In addition, a political party acts as a “brand name,” providing information to voters about a legislator’s policy positions (Aldrich, 1995; Snyder Jr. and Ting, 2001). Further, membership in an ideologically incompatible party can have significant costs. Legislators will be less able to advance their preferred agenda, potentially angering voters and frustrating the legislator’s own policy goals. Parties might also punish their less compatible members by giving them fewer advancement opportunities, refusing to support their proposals, or even preventing them from speaking on the floor. As a result, legislators should prefer membership in ideologically proximate parties and avoid parties far from their own ideal points. Ideological compatibility is clearly a club good. All legislators enjoy (or suffer) their (in-)compatibility with their copartisans. Differentials in ideological agreement should prompt legislators’ switching to, or staying in, the most compatible party. Pork or Policy? Legislators may have to balance competing desires for state resources and ideological compatibility. In such situations, their behavior should reflect constituents’ demands. Legislators from less-developed regions should prioritize access to state resources to deliver the public infrastructure their constituents need. Legislators from more-developed regions should be more responsive to ideological concerns, as basic infrastructural needs have been satisfied. This logic implies interacting pork and ideology differentials with an index of development. Legislators’ Value-Added: gi With important exceptions, most deputies have a positive impact on f(G) for most parties. In the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, size matters. Most resources are allocated proportionally: committee assignments and chairships, as well as chamber leadership positions are a direct function of party size. In addition, for members of the governing coalition, commanding additional votes usually translates into


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additional cabinet positions and government jobs when negotiating with the executive branch. The important exceptions include the several Brazilian parties that rely more on their ideological cohesion and policy label to generate votes than on their capacity to generate pork. For such parties, ideologically inconsistent legislators have a negative gi and should be denied admission. Summary of Predictions The preceeding discussion offers the following hypotheses regarding party membership in Brazil: • H1: Increasing transaction costs decreases switching. Legislators with more partisan voters will be less likely to switch party. • H 2: Increasing resource differentials increases switching into resourcerich parties. State resources: Legislators stay in or switch into governing parties, but the attractiveness of such parties may decline as coalition size grows. Electoral Opportunity: Legislators stay in or switch into parties with easy electoral thresholds. Ideology: Legislators stay in, or switch into ideologically compatible parties. Pork or Policy: Legislators from less developed regions are most responsive to resource access; legislators from developed regions are more responsive to ideological concerns. • H3: Parties exclude legislators with negative value-added. Switchers will be welcomed when their value-added is positive but excluded when ideologically too inconsistent with a party.

Methods The formal model can be operationalized empirically as a discrete choice problem. Legislators pick the party that maximizes their expected payoff, a function of party resources less transaction costs. In a multiparty environment, we can write this as Uijt = MAX(Ui1t, Ui2t , Ui3t, . . ., Uimt), where uijt is legislator i’s utility of membership in party j at time t. When party j is her current party, she stays put. When j is some other party, we observe a switch. I write legislator i’s utility associated with membership in party j as uijt = b0 + b1 Xijt − b2TiIj≠home + b3gi + eijt,

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where Xijt is a matrix of the covariates described earlier, and b1 is a vector of coefficients. If we assume that the eipt are independent and identically distributed following an extreme-value distribution, then this becomes a standard conditional logit model, also known as McFadden’s choice model. Though rarely used by political scientists, the conditional logit has been widely used by economists to explore individuals’ choices between products, transportation options, and, most comparable to this project, migration patterns.10 Measurement To test my hypotheses, I collected data on party membership, constituencies, and party characteristics for all deputies during the 49th and 50th legislatures (1991–1994 and 1995–1999, respectively). Estimating coefficients requires measuring the benefits that each legislator expects to receive from each party. The unit of analysis is the legislator-month, that is, each legislator’s membership choice during each month in office.11 Dependent Variable: Membership at time t The dependent variable follows standard practice for choice models.12 Yijt is legislator i’s choice of party during month t, coded “1” if the legislator chose party j and “0” otherwise. Electoral Threshold I measure electoral payoff differentials with Tdiff. I first calculated Threshold for each legislator-party combination, coded “1” if legislator i would have been elected in party j, and “0” otherwise. Finally, I calculate the threshold differential as Tdiff = Thresholdij − Thresholdik, where i references the legislator, j references the prospective party, and k references the current party. This measure captures both the electoral value of a party and the marginality of the legislator. Some legislators would have been elected in any party, so party membership does not affect their electoral prospects directly. For such deputies, Tdiff=0 for all parties. For weaker legislators, party strength matters; whereas some parties reduce electoral prospects, others increase them, as captured in the negative or positive values of Tdiff.


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State Resources Measuring the pork and other resource benefits of party membership in Brazil can be quite difficult. Because Brazil uses multimember district elections with high district magnitude, scholars cannot easily tie government expenditures to individual legislators. One alternative would be to use budget amendments, but amendments are frequently ignored by the executive branch and are only a small part of government expenditures. In fact, the executive branch at all levels of government has very strong control over budget development, expenditures, and other components of resource distribution (Schneider, 2001). Most real access to financial resources is gained through individual legislators’ lobbying of the president and ministers, consistent with patterns observed in other countries. How can we measure access to government resources? Ames (2001) creatively used meetings with ministers as a proxy for pork access. As no such data are available for my time period, I use coalition membership as a crude, but unbiased, proxy for access to resources. • Cabinetijt is coded “1” if party j was part of the president’s coalition at time t, and “0” otherwise. • Governorij is coded “1” if prospective party j was in the governor’s office in legislator i’s home state, and “0” otherwise.

Ideology I test the impact of ideological compatibility differentials on party membership using Ideological Distance ij, the relative proximity of prospective party j.13 Ideal points are estimated using the WNOMINATE method (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997). Pork or Policy? Which of these payoffs matters most to legislators will depend on the underlying preferences of their constituents. As a proxy for preferences, I use Educationi, the percentage of legislator i’s constituents with four or more years of education. I interacted this variable with Cabinet, Governor, and Ideological Distance. Education is highly correlated with other demographic indicators of development. A wellknown pattern in Brazilian politics, as in many other countries, is that pork, patronage, and clientelism are more common in less-developed regions, and policy promises are likely to be the currency of politics in more developed regions. Cabinet and Governor should have

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their strongest impact in low education regions; Ideological Distance should have its strongest impact in high education regions. Transaction Costs Precisely identifying the partisanship of each legislator’s vote share is impossible, given the lack of detailed survey data and the high district magnitude in Brazil. We can, however, measure the degree to which each party has a partisan following using list votes. Under OLPR, voters have two choices in Brazil: to cast votes for individual candidates, or to cast votes for the overall party list. The great majority (more than 90 percent in 1994) cast personal votes, but this varies substantially across party. In the center-right Liberal Front Party (PFL), only approximately 1 percent of the votes were list votes, while the Worker’s Party (PT) received almost 34 percent list votes. I use two measures of partisanship: District Partisanshipi and National Partisanshipj. For each, I take advantage of the structure of the Brazilian ballot, on which, again, voters can vote for individuals or for the party list. District Partisanshipi is the percentage of legislator i’s electoral base that cast party list votes. Specifically, I calculated an average of list voting in the areas where each legislator received votes, weighted by the proportion of votes earned in each area. This measures partisanship among each legislator’s subconstituency within a district. National Partisanshipi is the percentage of list votes received by the legislator’s party, based on national returns. Together, these proxy partisanship: the first captures characteristics of the voters in i’s electoral base; the second controls for the size of a party’s following in aggregate. Because both variables were highly skewed, I used their natural logs in all models. Legislators’ Value-Added: gi All legislators make a small positive contribution to all parties, but deputies that are ideologically incompatible will have a negative effect on the party’s policy label. This implies that a deputy i’s value-added in party j is gi = c −

␥i − ␶ j ␴j

where c is the constant value-added that all parties receive, γi is legislator i’s ideal point, and tj is party j’s centroid, and sj is the standard deviation of the ideal points of party j’s members. Thus, being


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far from a diverse catch-all party (large sj) is not problematic for a legislator; the second term is small and gi is positive. But being far from a highly cohesive and unified party (small sj) is problematic: gi is negative. Despite the clarity of this logic, the value-added cannot be operationalized separately from payoffs. The first term, c, is a constant. The second term is too highly correlated with ideological compatibility to be estimated separately. Effectively, this means that the Ideological Distance term must do double duty in the model, capturing both legislators’ payoffs and their value-added. Controls Building on existing work on party switching, Brazilian politics, and quantitative methods, I included several additional variables as controls: • PRN controls for the stigma associated with the Party of National Reconstruction (PRN), as President Collor was impeached for corruption in 1992. PRN is a dummy variable coded “1” for that party from the time the scandal broke until the end of the relevant legislature (August 1991–December 1994), and “0” otherwise. • Home is a dummy variable identifying legislator i’s current party, effectively a constant controlling for the baseline frequency of switching. • Committeeit is coded “1” if legislator i was on a key committee, or a committee leader, at time t. Committee should have a negative impact on switching: committee assignments are controlled by party leaders and may be lost by switching. • Party Leaderit is coded “1” if legislator i was a leader or a vice leader of her party within the legislature at time t, and “0” if she was not. Party leadership provides prestige, additional staff and office resources, and influence over the legislative agenda. Deputies in leadership positions should be less likely to switch. • Incumbent is a dummy variable coded “1” for incumbents and “0” for first-term legislators. More experienced deputies should be less likely to change party. • I also included several time-specific variables to control for key moments and differences in the legislative cycle, and to allow the underlying hazard rate of switching to vary during the legislative session (Beck, Katz, and Tucker, 1999; Mershon and Shvetsova, 2008a, b). As seen in figure 5.5, switching is common in the early periods of the session during organization and committee assignments. Switching is also common before elections—both national (1994 and 1998) and subnational (1992 and 1996). To run for reelection or for a new office, candidates had to finalize their preelection party membership months before the election, and these deadlines were lengthened after 1994. This explains the spike in early 1992 and then at the end of 1995 before mayoral

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Results Tables 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 show coefficient estimates and predicted probabilities for models of party affiliation. Overall, the results show that my affiliation model fits the Brazilian case quite well. The supposedly chaotic and antiparty behavior of Brazilian legislators in actuality reflects calculated and rational career moves. In particular, the data suggest that legislators are seeking distributive, ideological, and some electoral opportunities, but that institutional resources are not highly valued. Further, party switching patterns vary with constituency types. Characteristics of the electorate raise and lower transaction costs, and shift legislators’ priorities between ideology and distributive functions of parties. I now discuss more specific results. First, there is evidence that legislators use Brazilian parties as electoral vehicles. Brazil’s electoral rules can make election easier in some parties than in others, and party affiliation patterns take these rules into account. The coefficient on Threshold is positive and significant: legislators choose parties where vote-pooling will facilitate reelection, and avoid parties with thresholds that are too high. Table 5.5 shows

Number of Switches

30

20

10 5 0 1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

Number of Switches

Period

30 20 10 0 1996

1997

1998

1999

Period

Figure 5.5 Party switching by month in the 49th and 50th Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.


Conditional logit model of affiliation decisions Model 1

Payoffs Threshold Cabinet Cabinet*Educ. Governor Gov.*Educ Ideol Distance Ideol Dist.*Educ Transaction Costs District Partisanship National Partisanship Controls Committee Incumbent Party Leader National Campaign Election Deadline Organize Period 50th Leg. PRN Home N LL

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Model 2

Coef.

SE

Coef.

SE

.88 1.14 –.80 1.51 –1.86 –.79 .15

.32** .28** .53 .35** .69** .37* .64

.89 .73

.32** .09**

1.62 –2.09 –.71

.34** .67** .13**

–.40 –.49

.07** .07**

–.40 –.49

.07** .07**

–.02 –.19 –.45 –.89 1.88 .91 .83 –1.30 12.51

.12 –.13 –.16** –.25** .19** .27** .19** .31** .51**

–.46 –.88 1.89 .91 .81 –1.33 12.62

.16** .25** .19** .27** .18** .31** .51**

43,286 –1981.47

43,286 –1983.76

Note: Cubic spline estimates not shown. * = p-value < .05. ** = p-value < .01.

the substantive impact: legislators more than twice as likely (p = .71) to choose a party with an easy electoral threshold as compared to one where additional votes are needed for reelection (p = .29). Second, legislators value ideological compatibility when choosing between parties. Deputies do not want to join or stay in a party that is far from their own policy preferences; the coefficient on Ideol Distance is negative and significant. The impact is substantial: deputies are approximately five times more likely to pick an ideologically proximate party than one at the opposite end of the political spectrum (p = .86 versus p = .14). In other words, the farther a deputy is from a party, the more likely he or she is to switch away if he or she

Table 5.5 Impact of selected party characteristics on predicted probability of membership (95 percent Confidence Intervals in Parentheses) Electoral Threshold Below

Above

0.29

0.71

(.18, .42)

(.58, .82)

Cabinet Membership Opposition

Cabinet

0.32

0.68

(.29, .37)

(.63, .71)

Ideological Distance Far

Close

.14

.86

(.07, .23)

(.77, .93)

State Coalition Education Low High

Opposition

Governor

0.21 (.14, .31) 0.53 (.40, .66)

0.79 (.70, .86) 0.47 (.34, .60)

Table 5.6 Impact of transaction costs on probability of switching P(Switch) National

District Low High

Low

High

0.061 0.013

0.010 0.002


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is a member, and the less likely he or she is to switch to that party if he or she is not. This finding is evidence that legislators do care about ideological consistency and compatibility, consistent with Heller and Mershon (Heller and Mershon 2005; 2008). These results would hardly be surprising in most legislatures; they are potentially controversial for Brazilianists. Brazil’s largest parties have been categorized as “inchoate” and “catch-all.” The natural question is: Why should voting coalitions matter for legislators in such parties? The importance of roll-call compatibility may reflect legislators’ own desire to be ideologically consistent, pressure from party leaders, or pressure from constituents. Which factor is at work cannot be parsed out here, but the key point is that Brazilian legislators do value parties as voting coalitions. Third, the analysis confirms the importance of distributive capacity for legislators’ careers; the coefficient for Cabinet is positive and significant. Legislators in parties with access to federal government largesse are more likely to stay put, and switchers are more likely to head for such parties. When choosing between two otherwise identical parties, legislators are about twice as likely to pick a cabinet party than an opposition party: pCabinet = .68 versus POpp = .32. This is consistent with existing work on the importance of patronage in Brazilian politics (Amorim Neto, 1998). Governor is positive and significant, and the interaction of Education and Governor is negative and significant, as predicted. In impoverished and less-developed areas, voters prioritize governismo—following the state governor in exchange for access to state resources. In such areas, legislators in a gubernatorial party are more likely to stay put, and switchers more likely to make such a party their destination. This finding shows that decentralized Brazil’s state politics spill over into the national arena, affecting party affiliation decisions and coalition formation. These results echo previous research on the impact of federalism on national politics in Brazil (Abrúcio, 1998; Mainwaring, 1999; Samuels, 2003), and yet also establish an important additional point. Gubernatorial influence varies with constituency type. A deputy with a low-education constituency is approximately three times more likely to pick a state governor’s party over a state opposition party (p = .79 versus p = .21). But among high-education constituencies, legislators are effectively ambivalent between state opposition and governing parties: p = .53 versus p = .47, respectively.14 In impoverished and less-developed areas, where voters prioritize governismo,

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legislators align with the state governor in exchange for access to state resources. In more developed areas, voters’ demands for localistic goods decline. This decline reduces the relative attractiveness of stateruling parties and increases the relative importance of ideological and other factors in affiliation decisions. The other interaction effects were not significant. The Education *Cabinet interaction is negative, as predicted, but its effect is not significant. It may be that the benefits of membership in executive coalitions vary across governmental levels. Perhaps national cabinet membership provides payoffs to legislators with all kinds of constituencies, while gubernatorial affiliations are most important in backward, clientelistic contexts. The other possibility is collinearity between Governor and Cabinet status—parties in the national Cabinet also tend to be parties winning gubernatorial elections. I also predicted that the interaction of Distance and Education would be negative, reflecting an increased attention to ideological consistency as voters’ preferences change. However, the interaction effect is small, has the wrong sign, and is not significantly different from zero. Two interpretations are possible. The first is that my argument about voters does not apply to voting coalitions; perhaps all legislators are equally concerned with ideological consistency, regardless of their constituents’ preferences. The other interpretation is that legislators with more educated constituents have already self-selected into the parties that are ideologically most proximate. Finally, the results emphasize the importance of voters in creating strong and stable party systems. Legislators with more partisan constituencies are much less likely to ever switch party. Table 5.6 reports the probability that a legislator switches party during a four-year legislative term as a function of partisanship. In all cases, the choice set is restricted to two identical parties, so these probabilities can be interpreted as the impact of random, unobserved, within-party personality conflicts and struggles that cause switches. The hypothetical party list voting levels are set to 0.6 percent (low) and 30 percent (high), which is slightly narrower than the actual range of the data. Legislators in less partisan parties, with personalistic constituencies, have a .061 probability of switching during the term, even when there are no payoff differentials. At the other extreme, legislators with more partisan electoral bases are very unlikely to switch, with a predicted probability of switching of just .002 over a four-year period. The control variables operate mostly as expected. Incumbency may deter switching—its coefficient is negative—though it does not reach


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conventional levels of significance. Party leaders, not surprisingly, are significantly more likely to stay put than nonleaders. The findings also have important implications for the parties’ internal organization of the Brazilian legislature. Scholars have argued that party leaders’ control of the mechanisms of the Chamber of Deputies enables them to enforce discipline and maintain party cohesion. Of all resources in the Chamber, party leaders have the most direct control over committee assignments. Apparently, however, this control is nearly worthless. Good committee assignments do not deter switching; the coefficient on Com is not distinguishable from zero. The time-specific variables did shape switching frequency. Legislators were more likely to switch party around campaign filing deadlines, and significantly more likely to stay put during campaigns. The coefficients on Organize and Deadline are positive and significant, indicating that switching is more frequent during the first part of each session when coalitions, committees, and leadership are forming, and immediately before new election filing deadlines.

5.3 Effects of Party Switching Party switching in Brazil is apparently highly rational and structured by formal and informal institutions. But how does this affect policymaking and representation? Do switchers change their policy positions to match their new parties’ platforms? Or do switchers stick with their original campaign promises to constituents? The answers to these questions are important in contradictory ways for the functioning of democracy. On the one hand, if switchers change their policy positions, this means that political party membership is in some sense meaningful, in that switchers can offer their new party labels as information shortcuts for voters. On the other hand, from the voters’ perspective, if switchers change their behavior, this implies breaking campaign promises and abandoning policy platforms previously presented to voters. To answer these questions, I examine roll-call votes for evidence of changes in policy positions before and after switching party. I use two approaches. First, I examine basic measures of party agreement before and after switching. Second, I build and estimate a spatial model of behavior.

5.3.1 Switching and Agreement Scores We can observe basic behavioral patterns by simply comparing the extent to which switching legislators vote with their old and new

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parties, before and after switching. Define a legislator L’s agreement with party P, LP, as: LP

n

I

i 1 Pi Li

n

.

Pi and Li are the party’s and legislator’s positions on bill i, respectively, so I Pi = Li is an indicator variable coded “1” if the party and legislator agree, and “0” if they take differing positions. Effectively, this is the percentage of times that a legislator votes with a party leader’s recommendation. Table 5.7 compares basic party agreement scores for the 49th and 50th legislatures. These can be interpreted as the proportion of the time that a randomly chosen legislator voted with the majority of his or her party. For both switchers and nonswitchers, overall agreement is fairly high: more than .70 for the first period, and more than .80 for the second period. For both legislatures, there is a very small difference between the two groups; nonswitchers have slightly higher agreement scores than switchers. This is consistent with the previous section: switchers tend to be those who have ideological disagreements with their parties, and these disagreements are partly what make them switchers in the first place. Now focus only on switchers. If parties do not matter, then legislators should vote with their old party just as much after switching as before; if parties do influence behavior, then legislators should increase their voting with their new party, and decrease their voting with their old party. Table 5.8 reports pre- and post-switch agreement scores. For each legislature, the top left cell shows mean agreement scores while in their old parties; the bottom right cell shows the same while in their new parties. The off-diagonals show agreement with the new party before switching and agreement with the old party after switching. That is, they capture the extent to which a deputy votes with his or her old party after leaving it, and the extent to which a Table 5.7

Party agreement scores Legislature

Switchers Nonswitchers

49

50

.75 .76

.83 .84


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Switching and party agreement scores Legislature 49th

Old Party New Party

50th

Before

After

Before

After

.76 .60

.64 .73

.82 .72

.78 .84

deputy votes with his or her new party before even joining it. There are clear and obvious changes in legislators’ behavior, lending support to the party influence hypothesis. In the first term, before changing, deputies voted with their party’s positions approximately 76 percent of the time; after changing, they voted with their old party significantly less, just 64 percent of the time. Similarly, they voted with their new party just 60 percent of the time before switching and 73 percent of the time after switching. Agreement scores increased across the board for the 50th legislature, but the same basic pattern emerges, suggesting significant changes in voting behavior by legislators. Switchers do modify their voting behavior to align more closely with their new party after changing, providing evidence of party influence over legislators.

5.3.2 A Spatial Test The agreement measures provide compelling support for the party influence hypothesis, but do not include any spatial component. In this section, I build a simple spatial model to test for party influence by using standard spatial methods. A standard random utility model of voting is as follows. Let ui be legislator i’s ideal point, bj be the location of a “yes” vote on bill j, and αj be the location of a “no” vote on bill j. Legislator i votes “yes” on bill j if f(ui − bj + eij) < f(ui − αj + eij) and “no” if f(ui − bj + eij) > f(ui − αj + eij), where eij is an iid random variable and f describes legislators’ utility functions. Typically, e is distributed iid normal or extreme

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value, generating a probit or logit-like model, and f is quadratic or exponential.15 In the above model, ui is effectively a combination of legislators’ own preferences and pressures from party organizations and other actors. We can further separate the u into legislator- and party-specific components: ui = (1 − α)Li + αPj, where 0 ≤ α ≤ 1. In this case, α measures the relative influence of parties over legislators’ observed ideal points, which reflect both party (P) and personal (L) preferences.16 When α is at its minimum value (α = 0), all of legislators’ behavior reflects their own preferences. When α is at its maximum (α = 1), all of legislators’ behavior reflects party preferences. In a system with stable party membership, this is a purely academic exercise. With only one measure of u per legislator, ui is an irreducible function of legislators’ own preferences, party influence, and other possible pressuring actors. Without additional information or strong assumptions, we cannot distinguish between party and legislators’ preferences. Although both ideal point and party influence parameters could be jointly estimated from a single model (see Desposato [2006], e.g.), for simplicity’s sake I adopt a two-step process, estimating ideal points, then using ideal points to estimate α, as follows. Step one: estimate ideal points for legislators and parties. For legislators, I separately estimate each observed legislator-party combination. In other words, if a legislator switches from the Democratic Worker’s Party (PDT) to the Liberal Front Party (PFL), I estimate two ideal points for him or her: one for his or her votes cast while in the PDT (uiPDT), and another for his or her votes cast while in the PFL (uiPFL). To estimate party locations (P), I use two methods. First, I estimate each party’s ideal point as the median of its nonswitching members. Second, I estimate a separate party ideal point by counting publicly taken party positions as votes. When party leaders have declared a party position before roll-call votes, I count that position as a party vote for the purpose of estimating a party location.


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Step two: estimate α with a simple linear model: ui = αPk + (1 − α)Li + eik This is a fixed-effects model, where the dependent variable is switcher i’s ideal point while in party k, the covariate Pk measures party k’s ideal point, α is the coefficient of interest, and a fixed effect is inserted to capture (1 − α)Li.17 The core hypotheses to be tested are: • H 0: α1 = 0; α2 = 0 Legislators are uninfluenced by parties and executives; their votes reflect only their own preferences or those of their constituents (see footnote 16). The observable implication of this hypothesis is that there are no significant changes in the estimated ideal points of switchers. • H1: α1 > 0 Legislators’ roll-call votes are influenced by their parties. Switchers move closer to the party they switch into. Legislators’ roll-call votes are influenced too by the executive branch. At the extreme, if the president has influence but not the parties, we will observe changes in ideal points for legislators switching into or out of cabinet parties, but not for those switching between parties within the cabinet circle or within the circle of the opposition.

5.3.3 Data To test these hypotheses, I used all roll-call votes from the Chamber of Deputies, 1989–1998. I used two sources. First, I collected all roll-call votes directly from the Secretaria Geral da Mesa in Brasilia. Second, I compared these results with Argelina Figueiredo and Fernando Limongi’s dataset of roll-call votes. Results were similar for both datasets. Ultimately, I report results from their data because the Figueiredo-Limongi dataset includes party and presidential positions on key votes. I use the Poole and Rosenthal (1997) WNOMINATE scores to summarize legislators’ voting behavior.

5.3.4 Results Tables 5.9 and 5.10 show results from estimating only party effects while excluding executive pressures. The tables report estimated values for α using both measures of party preferences discussed earlier for three legislatures (1987–1999, inclusive). Each value of α was estimated in a model including fixed-effects for each legislator; estimated fixed effects are not shown. The first table shows estimates from the

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Table 5.9 Party influence measures—Dimension 1 Legislature 48th

^ α Party Leader Party Median

49th SE **

.44 .54

.11 .10**

^ α

50th SE **

.44 .49

.09 .09**

^ α

SE

.75 .81

.03** .03**

Note: Deputy-specific fixed-effects not shown. * = p-value < .05. ** = p-value < .01.

Table 5.10

Party influence measures—Dimension 2 Legislature 48th

^ α Party Leader Party Median

.37 .60

49th SE .08** .09**

50th

^ α

SE

^ α

SE

.22 .24

.10** .11**

.64 .71

.04** .05**

Note: Deputy-specific fixed-effects not shown. * = p-value < .05. ** = p-value < .01.

first dimension WNOMINATE scores; the second table shows second dimension estimates. Both tables reveal consistent and significant party influences over legislative behavior; switchers on average do change their voting to better match their new party’s preferences. Party influence is significant on both dimensions using all measures for all legislators, across all models. In general, the median-based estimates are larger than the party leadership-based estimates, but the two tend to move in sync. Further, the results suggest that Brazilian parties are in fact getting stronger, with party influence rising from approximately .50 in the 48th legislature (first dimension) to more than .75 in the 50th legislature. This suggests some ongoing consolidation of the political system, which marches with the evolution of the broader environment during these periods. The first two terms were fairly chaotic and transitory, with some doubt as to the survival of the young democratic regime. Brazil suffered hyperinflation, especially in the first


139

term, with occasional sabre-rattling by the military and rumors of coup attempts. In the second, President Collor was impeached for corruption, his party imploded, and the vice president who replaced him (Itamar Franco) had only weak ties to the existing political parties. Finally, in the third term, during the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, economic reform stabilized the economy, and Cardoso was able to construct a stable governing coalition. This increasing party influence might be seen as good news by some, but the implications for representation are contradictory. On the one hand, the evidence of party influence is encouraging; it suggests that, to the extent that political parties do have influence over their members, voters can use the party identification of candidates as a proxy for a set of issue positions. On the other hand, knowing that switchers will likely change their behavior in a new party is troubling. You might vote for a candidate from one party representing one set of ideals, but after a party switch, he she might support an entirely different set of positions. How can we reconcile the two perspectives? Figure 5.6 displays patterns of switching in two dimensions. Each point represents a legislator-party, an ideal point estimated using the roll-call votes each legislator cast while in one or another party. The first dimension captures a classic left-right dimension and accounts for most of the roll-call voting behavior; it is easily the predominant 1.0

Dimension 2

0.5

0.0

−0.5

−0.1 −0.1

−0.5

0.0

0.5

Dimension 1 Figure 5.6 Ideology and switching in the 50th Brazilian legislature.

1.0

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dimension, with an aggregate proportional reduction in error (APRE) score of more than .85. The second dimension distinguishes parties on a number of issues, including government and opposition within ideological tendencies, but has much weaker predictive power. The lines link before and after locations for all switchers during the 50th legislature. Some deputies do switch from one extreme to another, from the far left to the far right. Most of the lines are vertical, however, meaning that switchers did not move far on the first dimension. Instead, most switched within the same center-right coalition, often from parties that were not included in the governing coalition, to parties with cabinet positions and redistributable pork. These vertical lines represent changes in behavior on secondary issues, not on the primary system conflict. This pattern also integrates the results from the preceeding section (switchers do not choose distant parties) with the results from this section (switchers change to be more like their new party). Legislators do change their behavior to match their new parties, and they are more likely to switch if alienated ideologically. Yet most switchers are not moving very far, usually within the large center-right coalition. Finally, combined with the interactive results, the implication is that party switching is not inconsistent with representation, for most Brazilian voters. Legislators who switch tend to avoid moving “far” ideologically, but they will make some changes. Many of these switchers are motivated by the pursuit of government resources, similar to earmarks in the United States. Especially in less developed areas, constituents prefer delivery of developmental local public goods to die-hard ideological stands.

5.4 Conclusion As indicated at the outset, the Brazilian system is in a critical transitional moment. In March 2007, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that elected offices belong to parties, not to individual candidates. The immediate effect was to call into question the status of the many deputies who had switched since taking office on February 1, 2007. Since then, virtually no deputies have changed party. The likely impact of this exogenous shock is unclear. For the short run, this ruling has put an end to party switching. Within the legislature, this could strengthen or weaken parties, and could strengthen or weaken representation in Brazil. For parties, removing the “exit” option may mean that legislators will be more vulnerable to leaders’ demands and directions, thus increasing party cohesion. On the other hand, if


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party leaders are less powerful, the ruling could reduce party cohesion by forcing ideologically diverse politicians to stay together, rather than moving on to parties that better suit their or their constituents’ policy opinions. These divergent possibilities also imply different representational outcomes. If parties are more cohesive, voters may have clearer choices and greater certainty of the impacts of their votes. Further, these elite changes might enhance issue-based voting at the mass level. On the other hand, less cohesive parties could dramatically increase voter uncertainty about the ideological impact of a vote, and further discourage issue voting. A possible secondary product of this scenario is that legislative elections will be increasingly personalistic and pork-oriented, but legislators will not be able to switch party in pursuit of pork. Numerous other scenarios are possible. Switching could reappear as a preelection phenomenon. A legislator who wants to run for executive office but is denied his or her party’s nomination could switch party and resign to run under a different label. Alternatively, the ban might be overturned. Indeed, a bill to relegalize switching has already been introduced. No matter which scenario materializes, Brazil will provide a useful natural experiment in the effort to assess the impact of a ban on switching on representation and governability.

5.5

Notes

1. Halfway through the current legislative period, there have been 135 switches for a projected rate of .57 by January 2006. 2. Note that in a two-party system, the two approaches are identical. Switching party in the United States nearly always means moving from Democrat to Republican, or Republican to Democrat. Even in the United States, however, switchers have more than two choices (switch/not switch). They may become independents or join a third party as some recent switchers have done (e.g., Lieberman). 3. Club goods may not be entirely nonrival, however: each additional member may slightly degrade the quality of the club good. For example, as a party’s size grows, it may become a catch-all party, and its ideological label may lose meaning. New members with very similar ideological positions will have minimal degrading effects; legislators with distinctly different or even contradictory positions may reduce the value of the party label dramatically. 4. More recently, party leaders in Ecuador informally agreed to allow illegal party switching to continue so that a minority president could increase his legislative coalition size. The rule in Japan applies to legislators elected through proportional representation, and only prohibits switching to a party that competed in their same district. 5. The market for party membership has clear parallels with labor markets, with three important differences. First, endogenous parties, not firms, make

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Scott Desposato personnel decisions. Second, personnel decisions are made to maximize members’ utility, not profits. Third, instead of wages, legislators receive payoffs that may be private or club goods. At this point, the model begins to bear a striking resemblance to the market for political science faculty, in which personnel decisions are made by majority vote to maximize departmental quality and payoffs are partly private goods (wages) and partly club goods (reputation). Candidates for office must stay in a single party in the months leading up to the election. This provision was recently eliminated by a court decision but was in effect for the period covered by my dataset. For the executive, supermajorities may well be cheaper, as they allow the president to pay lower costs on a vote-by-vote basis to buy a majority. Under OLPR rules, citizens cast a single vote, usually for an individual candidate. Seats are distributed to parties based on the total of votes received by all of the parties’ candidates. Mandates are distributed to candidates based on the total number of votes each receives. See Ames (2001, 1995a, b), and Mainwaring (1999) for more details on OLPR. See McFadden (1973), Maddala (1983), and Long (1997). Alternative choice models can be implemented with more flexible error distribution assumptions, but are only tractable for smaller choice sets and datasets. See Glasgow (2001) for more details. An alternative, and possibly more accurate, specification would incorporate parties’ valuation of legislators separate from deputies’ choices—a model where parties first decide whether to accept a legislator, then legislators choose from the choice set available to them. I have a working paper demonstrating how to estimate such a model, but it proved intractable for this dataset. Why is it necessary to use a time-based measure of affiliation decisions? First, many of the key variables in the model—cabinet formation, committee assignments and leadership, party leadership, and even the party of the president—vary over time, as do many of the control variables. During one period, legislator i’s party might have cabinet access. A month later, after a cabinet reshuffle, legislator i might be in the opposition. Second, the actual membership of the Chamber of Deputies is constantly in flux as legislators leave and substitutes take their places. Using the legislator-month as the unit of analysis accounts for the varying amount of time that each legislator actually serves in the Chamber. See Maddala (1983), Glasgow (2001), Long (1997), and Ben-Akiva and Lerman (1985). Specifically, Distanceip is calculated as DistDif fij = |γi − tj |, where γi is legislator i’s ideal point, tj, is the centroid of prospective party j. All discussions of interaction effects’ significance account for the covariance between the base and interactive terms. See Londregan (2002) and Poole and Rosenthal (1997) for additional discussion.


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16. For this project, I lump constituents and special interest influence with legislators’ own personal ideological positions into a single variable, L. I discuss relaxing that assumption in the conclusion. 17. Consequently, we cannot directly estimate 1−α, but can only get at it indirectly through the estimate of α.

5.6 References Abrúcio, Fernando. 1998. Os Barões da Federação: Os Governadores e a Redemocratização Brasileira. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec. Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aldrich, John H., and William T. Bianco. 1992. A Game-Theoretic Model of Party Affiliation of Candidates and Office Holders. Mathematical Computer Modeling 16(8–9): 103–116. Ames, Barry. 1995a. Electoral Rules, Constituency Pressures, and Pork Barrel: Bases of Voting in the Brazilian Congress. Journal of Politics 57(May): 324–343. ———. 1995b. Electoral Strategy under Open-List Proportional Representation. American Journal of Political Science 39(May): 406–433. ———. 2001. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Amorim Neto, Octavio. 1998. Of Presidents, Parties, and Ministers: Cabinet Formation and Legislative Decision-Making Under Separation of Powers. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, San Diego. Beck, Nathaniel, Jonathan N. Katz, and Richard Tucker. 1999. Taking Time Seriously: Time-Series-Cross-Section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable. American Journal of Political Science 42(October): 1260–1288. Ben-Akiva, Moshe, and Steven R. Lerman 1985. Discrete Choice Analysis: Theory and Application to Travel Demand. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carey, John M., and Matthew Soberg Shugart. 1995. Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of Electoral Formulas. Electoral Studies 14(December): 417–439. Desposato, Scott W. 2006. The Impact of Party Switching on Legislative Behavior in Brazil. Working Paper. Glasgow, Garrett. 2001. Mixed Logit Models for Multiparty Elections. Political Analysis 9(Spring): 116–136. Graham, Richard. 1990. Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Heller, William B., and Carol Mershon. 2005. Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996–2001. Journal of Politics 67(May): 536–559. ———. 2008. Dealing in Discipline: Party Switching and Legislative Voting in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000. American Journal of Political Science 52 (4): 910–925. Keck, Margaret E. 1995. The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Leal, Victor N. 1977. Coronelismo: The Municipality and Representative Government in Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press. Londregan, J. B. 2002. Appointment, Reelection, and Autonomy in the Senate of Chile. In Legislative Politics in Latin America, ed. Scott Morgenstern and Benito Nacif, 341–376. New York: Cambridge University Press. Long, J. Scott. 1997. Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables. Number 7 in Advanced Quantititative Techniques in the Social Sciences Series. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Maddala, G. S. 1983. Limited-Dependent and Qualitative Variables in Econometrics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mainwaring, Scott. P. 1997. Multipartism, Robust Federalism, and Presidentialism in Brazil. In Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Scott P. Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart, 55–109. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mainwaring, Scott. P. 1999. Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McFadden, Daniel. 1973. Conditional Logit Analysis of Qualitative Choice Behavior. In Frontiers in Econometrics, ed. Paul Zarembka, 105–142. New York: Academic. Mershon, Carol, and Olga Shvetsova. 2008a. Parliamentary Cycles and Party Switching in Legislatures. Comparative Political Studies 41(1): 99–127. ———. 2008b. Party Switching in Sitting Parliaments and the Midterm Effect. Annual Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research, Rennes, France. Pereira, Carlos, and Bernardo Mueller. 2004. The Cost of Governing: Strategic Behavior of the President and Legislators in Brazil’s Budgetary Process. Comparative Political Studies 37(7): 781–815. Poole, Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. 1997. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press. Samuels, David. 2003. Ambition, Federalism, and Legislative Politics in Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil. Latin American Politics and Society 48(Summer): 1–27. Schneider, Aaron. 2001. Federalism against Markets: Local Struggles for Power and National Fiscal Adjustment in Brazil. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley. Snyder Jr., James M., and Michael M. Ting. 2001. An Informational Rationale for Political Parties. American Journal of Political Science 46(January): 90–110.

III

Party Switching, Party Competition, and Policy Making


6 Party Group Switching in the European Parliament* Gail McElroy and Kenneth Benoit

6.1

Two Levels of European Party Competition

Party politics in the European Union (EU) is characterized by competition at two different levels. At the national level, political parties contest national, regional, and local elections. At a transnational level, national parties also compete in elections, for seats in the European Parliament (EP), the legislative body of the EU. National political parties remain the basic organizational unit at both the national and European levels, controlling access to European ballots in each member state, representing policy, and organizing election campaigns. National political parties also form the primary constituent units of the party groups in the EP, coming together to form transnational political entities. These EP party groups have considerable influence over office and policy at the European level, and their goals may be either compatible or conflicting with the interests of national member parties (Hix, Noury, and Roland 2007). EP party groups also formulate their own policy positions and seek to control important offices and legislative goods at the European level. Nonetheless, they remain fundamentally conglomerations of national level parties (Kreppel 2004, 977). A key question thus concerns the calculus of affiliation by which national political parties join or switch between EP party groups. On what basis do national political parties become members of EP party groups? Furthermore, given the fact that individual members of the EP (MEPs) and national parties both frequently change their party group affiliations in the EP, what motivates this form of switching? Directly addressing these questions is the main objective of our chapter. Although our examination is preliminary in the sense that we infer the motivations for changing party groups

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from a static examination of affiliation, the implications of our explanation of switching should form the basis for further, fuller examination along more dynamic lines and encompassing a longer period. Party competition in the EU has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years, yet significant lacunae exist in explaining the full dynamic of competition at the national and European levels. Political competition in Europe is traditionally studied at the national level. Studies of voter behavior and outcomes in European elections have mainly confirmed the national orientation of European elections, consigning EP elections to “second-order” status, mainly extending national political contestation in symbolic referendums on governing party support (e.g., Marsh 1998; Reif and Schmitt 1980). Other work examines national party positions on European issues, focusing on which national factors explain party support for EU integration (e.g., Dietz 2000; Marks and Wilson 2000; Marks, Wilson, and Ray 2002; Ray 2003; Taggart 1998), whether party positions toward the EU are independent or integrated with positions on traditional leftright political issues (e.g., Marks and Steenbergen 2004), or whether national political parties have changed their policies to become more favorable to the EU (Daniels 1998). A final research strand focuses on the rise and organization of party groups or “europarties” at the European level (Kreppel 2002; Raunio 1997) and the direct effects of these new organizations on national parties (e.g., Bardi 2002; Damm 1999; Dietz 1997; Niedermayer 1997). The dynamic of affiliation with EP party groups and switching by national parties and MEPs between them has received relatively scant attention, however. While party groups in the EP have been analyzed in terms of voting cohesion (Hix, Noury, and Roland 2005; Kreppel and Tsebelis 1999), the policy cohesion of their constituent national members has never come under systematic empirical scrutiny. And while McElroy (2003) has examined individual MEP switching among party groups, no study to date has explored the basis on which national political parties decide to affiliate or disaffiliate with EP party groups. The conventional wisdom, usually no more than an unexamined assumption, is that national party affiliation in transnational party groups, including the EP, is driven by historical tradition and a party’s set of core principles, usually rooted in enduring cleavages and represented by party family (see Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge 1994, 24). Yet party family explanations of EP party groups cannot explain several striking outcomes. First, national parties (as well as individual MEPs) quite frequently switch EP party groups,

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while remaining constant in terms of party family. Second, national party members of EP party groups clearly have heterogeneous positions on multiple dimensions of policy, a fact that cannot be captured by broad categories of party family. Finally, many national parties do not belong to clearly definable party families, either because their organizational basis does not correspond to the classic cleavages identified by Lipset and Rokkan (1967)—a situation characterizing many of the parties from the 12 post-communist member states—or because they are formed primarily around new (single) issues such as European integration or immigration. Our chapter investigates legislative party switching in the EP and in the process sheds light on the foundations of political parties in the EU. Our chapter proceeds as follows. The second section describes the organization of political competition at the national and European levels, and highlights the mechanisms available to EP party groups for maintaining policy coherence among their members. This discussion culminates in our hypotheses. Third, we address the compilation of the data used to test our hypotheses. Next, we characterize the European policy space, comparing the association of policy dimensions at the national and European levels. The fifth section examines the politics of EP party group choice and affiliation at the party level, and the sixth section evaluates the evidence on switching at the individual level.

6.2 The Organization of Party Politics in the EP 6.2.1

Political Groups in the EP

Just as with parties in national parliaments, political or party groups in the EP form the backbone of legislative organization and decision making, acting as the gatekeepers to legislative amendments and the vast bulk of interruptive and procedural motions in the assembly. Unlike national parties, political groups in the EP do not form governments; even so, political group size determines membership of committees and all other key parliamentary decision-making bodies. Furthermore, the legislative function of the EP has steadily grown in importance. Estimates suggest that as much as 60 percent of national legislation originates at the European level (Nugent 2003), an indication of the growing significance of the European arena for domestic policy. Since the inception of the EP in 1957, political groups have been officially recognized in the EP’s rules of procedure, and they have

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received financial support for administrative costs from the parliamentary budget. Seven political groups currently exist in the EP, representing almost 150 different national political parties from the 27 member states. These political groups vary significantly in their degree of institutionalization, as evidenced by age. For instance, the 2 largest groups, the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Party of European Socialists (PES), have existed for more than 50 years, whereas others, such as Independence and Democracy (iD) are much younger. At the time of writing (May 2008), the largest party, the EPP, has representatives from all 27 member states, comprising a total of 287 representatives from 46 different national political parties. In contrast, the Union for a Europe of Nations (UEN) has just 42 members from only 6 states of the EU while iD has a mere 23 members from 9 different member states. Our study of party group choices focuses on a slightly earlier phase, near the historic 2004 elections following the expansion of the EU to 25 member states. Table 6.1 provides details of the party groupings in the EP just before these elections, along with the number of national member parties they had. Over time, party groups in the EP have become increasingly cohesive and powerful. Levels of voting cohesion have risen across Table 6.1

Political party groups in the European Parliament pre-2004 election

EP Party Group

Label

Seat %

Seats

Member Parties

European People’s Party Party of the European Socialists European Liberal and Democrat Reform Party European United Left/Nordic Green Left Greens Union for a Europe of the Nations Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities Other Total

EPP PES ELDR

37.5 29.5 8.4

294 232 66

51 32 28

GUE Verts UEN EDD

7.0 6.0 3.8 2.2

55 47 30 17

19 20 11 5

5.6 100.0

44 785

16 182

Other

Note: These figures represent the standing in early June 2004, just before the 2004 European Parliament Elections. The 785 member total is composed of the 626 members from the 15 preenlargement states and the temporary members representing the accession states since May 1, 2004. Source: European Parliament official Web site (http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep5/owa/p_meps2. repartition).


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parliamentary sessions, especially for the three largest political groups, despite increases in the size of the EP and the number of member states (Hix, Noury, and Roland 2005; Raunio, 1997). The increasing importance of the political groups in the EP likely reflects the concomitant increase in powers of the parliament itself. Once a purely consultative institution, the EP is now, under the co-decision procedure, a co-legislator with the European Council in a wide variety of policy areas, covering everything from health, to consumer protection to the environment. In elections to the EP, party groups adopt policy platforms and issue manifestos as do the national political parties. The largest groups translate their election manifestos into most European languages, for dissemination among voters of all member states. The ELDR, for instance, translated its 2004 European election manifesto into 17 languages, and the EPP into 19 languages. National parties are not obligated to adopt the entirety of the EP group’s positions when formulating their own manifestos either for national or European elections, yet the availability of the EP party group manifestos makes any such differences quite clear and potentially problematic (Gabel and Hix 2004). Once in the EP, MEPs elected by national parties are organized into EP party groups, regularly issued voting instructions and, at least for the two largest groups, subject to a party whip. Party groups have mechanisms to punish MEPs who vote against the party group instructions, whether on individual initiative or (more likely, see Hix 2004) because of national party instructions. Party groups may demote members from important committee or rapporteur positions as punishments (McElroy 2002) or at an extreme may even expel MEPs from their party groups.1 Strong divergences in policy positions between national member parties and the EP party groups could therefore cause persistent conflicts between national party and EP party group voting positions. Hix, Noury, and Roland’s (2007, 137) analysis of roll-call votes from the 1999–2004 parliament, for instance, showed that approximately 7 percent of MEPs voted against their party group to vote with their national party. Most of the time (89 percent), however, MEPs vote in line with their party group (Attinà 1990; Hix, Noury, and Roland 2007). The high and increasing cohesion of MEP voting behavior suggests that the policy cohesion of national party members of EP party groups— policy cohesion measured independently from voting behavior, that is—should also be high.

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6.2.2

National Party Membership in EP Party Groups

At the national level, political parties in Europe continue to fulfill all of the classic functions of political parties, including representation, government formation, and articulation of policy platforms. Yet parties not only contest national elections but also contest EP elections. The overwhelming majority of viable candidates for the EP are recruited and sponsored by national political parties, who act as the principal gatekeepers to the European electoral arena (Mair 2000, 38). National parties also join EP party groups, usually as a bloc, although individual MEPs may also switch from one group to another.2 In EP elections, most national parties issue European election manifestos targeted specifically at their national electorates. These national party European manifestos stand alongside the European election manifestos of the EP party groups with which they are affiliated. The existence of these two policy platforms for the same election highlights the tension experienced by national parties. We expect that national parties, faced with this tension, will attempt to minimize the incongruence between their policy positions represented in the national and European arenas. When it comes to EP party group policy positions on issues of the greatest domestic importance, national parties will attempt to steer these, when possible, toward their own most preferred policies. National parties will also be motivated to become members of party groups whose overall policy platforms are closest to their own. National party policy positions change, sometimes dramatically, over time. The Comparative Manifestos Project has studied manifesto content in detail and has documented significant movement in party positions by major parties since World War II (Budge et al. 2001). If political parties affiliate with EP party groups on the basis of policy congruence, then movement of national party positions implies that EP party group membership should also change over time. Indeed, studies of party switching in the EP have shown just this: EP party group composition is quite dynamic. Not only are EP groups characterized by a high frequency of party switching, but also much of this switching occurs when national political parties decide to change EP group affiliations, bringing all their MEPs along with them. Table 6.2 documents notable party switches in recent EP sessions. For example, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) in Portugal switched from the Liberal (LDR) party group to the EPP in 1994.3


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Table 6.2 Party group volatility in the European Parliament: Notable examples of national party switching, 1989–2004 Party

Country

From

To

Year

Partido Popular Scottish National Party Izquierda Unida MSI Parti communiste français Socialistisk Folkeparti Agalev CDS Ulster Unionist Party D’66 Conservative Party Konservative Folkepartei PDS UDF PSD Vlaams Bloc Front National PSDI CDU-PCP Partido Nacionalista Vasco Socialistisk Folkeparti Liberalu˛ demokratu˛ partija Valstiecˇiu˛ ir Naujosios demokratijos partiju˛ sa˛junga UDF CDS/PP PEV Lega Nord Bloco de Esquerda League of Polish Peasants

Spain UK Spain Italy France Denmark Belgium Spain UK Netherlands UK Denmark Italy France Portugal Belgium France Italy Portugal Spain Denmark Lithuania Lithuania

ED RDE COM DR COM COM ARC NI DR NI ED ED GUE LDR LDR DR DR S CG Greens GUE/NGL ELDR EPP

PPE ARC GUE NI CG GUE V LDR PPE LDR PPE-ED PPE-ED S PPE PPE NI NI RDE GUE ALDE Greens UEN UEN

1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1992 1992 1993 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 2004 2004 2004 2004

France Portugal Portugal Italy Spain Poland

EPP UEN V NI NI NI

ALDE EPP GUE/NGL ID GUE ID

2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004

ARC/ARE: Arc en Ciel (Rainbow Group) CG: Coalitions des Gauches COM: Communists DR: Droites Européenes (Front National, Die Republikaner) ED: European Democratic Group ELDR (LDR/ALDE): European Liberal and Democratic Reform Group EPP (PPE): European People’s Party FE: Forza Europa (Forza Italia) GUE: Confederal Group of the European United Left NI: Unattached members PES (S): Party of European Socialists RDE: Group of the European Democratic Alliance TDI: Technical Group UEN: Union for a Europe of Nations

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6.2.3

Individual MEP Affiliations with EP Party Groups

Although the majority of MEPs become members of the EP party groups with which their national parties have declared an affiliation, individual MEPs may decide to switch their affiliations in the EP from one party group to another. This form of switching is not uncommon. In the Third Parliament (1989–1994), for instance, just less than 20 MEPs (almost 4 percent of all MEPs) chose to move individually to another party group from the one in which they commenced the legislative session. Previous studies of party switching have focused mainly on decisions taken by individual legislators, and previous work on the EP has indeed targeted this level (McElroy 2003). Switching is typically ascribed to office- and policy-seeking motivations, resting on the assumptions, respectively, that legislators are concerned primarily with winning elections (Downs 1957) and legislators aim chiefly at achieving policy outcomes (McKelvey and Schofield 1987). Most scholars now accept that there is some mix of these motivations in the political calculus of most actors, though there is no consensus on the precise nature of the trade-off (Strøm 1990). Previous studies of switching suggest that the electoral connection is paramount; for instance, Aldrich and Bianco’s (1992) model posits that members choose the party that maximizes their prospects of reelection. In the EP, however, electoral incentives appear to be extremely weak or even nonexistent. First, again, elections to the EP are not run on the basis of European issues but are “second-order elections” (Hix 2005; Reif and Schmitt 1980; Reif 1997). The elections serve as essentially informal referendums on national government performance; competition takes place between national political parties rather than the political groups of the EP.4 In addition, citizen knowledge on the activity of the EP and its political groups is very restricted, as has been documented in numerous surveys among voters in member states. Third, EP party groups do not control ballot access for candidates, a power instead retained by political parties at the national level. Fourth, EP party groups have only limited access to resources that can be used selectively to reward individual members for switching—and that feature prominently in accounts of switching in Brazil for instance (Ames 2001). Finally, the fact that most party switchers within the EP do not actually change their national party affiliation suggests that electoral incentives do not provide a pressing motivation for defection. Switchers generally run on the


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same national ticket in European elections both before and after they switch in the EP. For the 1989–1994 EP, a mere 10 percent of switches also involved a switch of political party at the national level. There are thus essentially two choices involved in the individual-level “calculus of candidacy” for the EP: the choice to affiliate with a particular national party and subsequently the choice to affiliate with a particular political group once in the parliament. The traditional electoral motivations may prevail in the first choice but do not appear to apply to the second. Given that incumbent MEPs nonetheless do switch from one group to another, the obvious question is: why do they bother? Previous work (McElroy 2003) suggests that both ideology and career advancement within the parliament play a role. EP party groups can offer a range of selective benefits internal to their groups, such as membership in the party bureau as well as party-group controlled committee assignments and chairmanships. Individual MEPs are also powerfully motivated by policy concerns, however, and previous research on the EP (McElroy and Benoit 2007; Hix, Noury, and Roland 2007) has yielded strong evidence that, for MEPs and their party groups, politics at the transnational level is primarily an extension of domestic politics, especially left-right politics on traditional issues. Thus, MEPs should also be motivated to switch to join a party grouping whose median policy preferences are relatively closely aligned with their own, or at least deterred from switching to a group whose median policy preferences are relatively far from their own.

6.2.4 Hypotheses This discussion may be recapitulated in two overarching testable hypotheses. Hypothesis 1. For national parties, the fundamental driving force behind affiliation and switching in EP party groups should be the desire to maximize policy congruence between their own positions and those of their group. National political parties should affiliate with the EP party groups whose policy platforms are closest to their own on important national policy dimensions. Pressures from the demands of contesting European elections should push national parties toward coherence in the policy platforms they develop for domestic and EP elections; such programmatic coherence in turn should strengthen the criterion of policy proximity as a motivation for choice of party group once in the EP. Moreover, EP party groups should attempt to maintain a degree of policy coherence among their national party members.

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Hypothesis 2. Policy concerns should feature prominently in individual MEP decisions to switch between party groups. MEPs who switch should seek groups whose legislative activities and voting instructions are more compatible with the individual MEPs’ own preferences. Conversely, individual MEPs should avoid switching into groups whose ideological positions are less compatible with their own, although individual switchers might also be motivated by the promise of career advancement.

6.3 Data: Policy Positions of Parties, Party Groups, and MEPs To evaluate our hypotheses, we have collected data at both the national party and individual MEP level from four principal sources. First, we have gathered data on national party affiliation into party groups in the EP. These data were drawn from the EP party groups in the Fifth Parliament (1999–2004) just before the 2004 elections, as detailed in McElroy and Benoit (2007) and portrayed in table 6.1. This snapshot in time captures the round of enlargement on May 1, 2004. Thus, represented in the parliament at this time are such political parties as the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has had members in the EP since the first constituent meeting of the assembly, and also the Eastern European parties that have only recently made affiliation decisions. In total, 182 national parties were represented in 7 political groups in early June 2004. Second, we gathered data on MEP switching at the individual level, collected from the party listings in the Medlemsfortegnelse (List of Members) published (at irregular intervals) each year. This part of our analysis is restricted to the Third EP (1989–1994). Two time points were chosen, membership immediately after the 1989 EP elections and membership in June 1993. The key advantage of selecting 1993 is that this was the year in which the co-decision procedure came into effect, a watershed moment in the history of the EP. There were 10 parties for each member to choose in 1989 and 8 in 1993.5 Third, for party positions on policy we draw on expert surveys of the policy positions of European party groups conducted by the authors from April to June 2004, and on expert surveys of the policy positions of European national parties reported in Benoit and Laver (2006). The survey of the EP party group positions is detailed in McElroy and Benoit (2007). In this survey of experts, conducted just before the June 2004 elections to the newly expanded EP, each party group was scored on a 20-point scale presenting two extremes of policy.


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Substantive policy dimensions covered in the survey included a set of four “core” dimensions deployed in every country in the Benoit and Laver data: increase spending versus reduce taxes; liberalism versus conservatism on social policy; pro-growth versus pro-environmental policy; and pro- versus antideregulation. Also included were a set of three questions about EU integration addressing party stances on the scope of EU authority, national control versus federalism, and approach to collective security. A full list of the question wordings and dimensions appears in McElroy and Benoit (2007). Following the Benoit and Laver (2006) methodology, we also measured the relative policy salience of each dimension to each political group. The results were therefore easily comparable to the Benoit and Laver data, which we employed for all measures of party policy at the national level for the EU-25 countries, covering a total of 146 of the 182 EU member state parties affiliated with EP party groups in June 2004. Finally, we draw on a number of individual-level data gathered on MEPs from the Third Parliament. In addition to measures of legislative privileges, we also estimated the ideal points of legislators by analyzing their roll-call votes using Poole and Rosenthal’s (1991) NOMINATE procedure.6 Roll-call vote analysis is common in the EP as a means of estimating party voting cohesion as well as the ideal points of parties and MEPs (see for instance Hix, Noury, and Roland 2007). Roll calls represent roughly one-third of all votes taken in the EP and the percentage of such votes has increased dramatically over the course of the past three decades. In addition to positions estimated from roll-call voting, we also compiled a set of career data on each MEP in the Third Parliament, tapping such variables as whether an MEP was in a leadership position in his or her party and what level of seniority the MEP had attained within his or her political group. As we have already pointed out, our examination should be treated as preliminary inasmuch as the data we have gathered is largely based on snapshots of party group affiliation in the EP at particular time periods. Nonetheless, to the extent that individual MEP switching has received almost no attention, and national party switching none, in previous comparative work, the largely static data analyzed here should form a valuable first step in establishing more completely the basis for a fully dynamic model of party group switching in the EP by individual members as well as national parties. As we show in the following text, the basis for affiliation and switching appears to be motivated most strongly by general policy concerns, and this finding applies to both levels we examine.

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6.4 Characterizing the European Policy Space Our overarching argument is that ideological divides at the national level and the preferences for policy that they imply drive legislative affiliation in the EP. For this argument to be sustained, the structure of party competition and policy contestation should be broadly similar at the national and EU levels. Before we examine the determinants of party group switching, therefore, we must establish that national and European parties inhabit the same general policy space. Although some have expected that the policy space in the EP will reflect divisions over the institutional and political development of the EU itself (Thomassen and Schmitt 1997), we believe that the more the Union integrates, the more it should be concerned with the issues that define national party competition, just as would be the case for any other federal entity. Indeed, Hix (2004) suggests the closest analogy for parliamentary parties in the EP is parties in the US Congress, with different US states represented by state delegations formed into political parties at the federal level. We therefore take as a maintained hypothesis that the political groups in the EP will structure the legislative behavior of their constituent national parties in the same fundamental political space that exists at the national level. If national and European parties do in fact inhabit a common policy space, two observations should hold. First, we should observe that the policy space at the national and transnational levels has a basically similar structure. In other words, issues relating to the “European” level should be fully integrated into national level competition. Second, policy competition at the European level should reflect policies formulated and contested at the national level, in a similar dimensional space.

6.4.1

Consistency of National and European Policy Positions

Our first comparison concerns the match between policy positions held by national member parties and those held by their party groups in the EP. For the general left-right dimension, figure 6.1 depicts the correspondence between party groups and member parties. Each dot represents the mean left-right policy position, and each bar, a 95 percent confidence interval. The mean positions for the EP party groups come from the EP expert placements, while the mean positions for the national member parties come from the mean expert placements of the parties in each party group. On the general left-right


159

EP EDD EP UEN Natl UEN EP EPP Natl EPP EP ELDR Natl ELDR EP PES Natl PES EP Verts Natl Verts EP GUE Natl GUE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Left−Right Dimension (1=Left, 20=Right) Figure 6.1 European party groups and national members on the general left-right scale.

dimension of policy, the party groups are ranked in the same order at both levels, with the rankings between party groups and national party means statistically indistinguishable for every party grouping. The left-right space appears to consist of four sets of party groups. First, the GUE and Verts appear on the far left, with a small degree of overlap in their 95 percent confidence intervals. Second, the PES inhabits the moderate center left. Third, two political groups, the ELDR and the EPP, form a grouping with a substantial degree of overlap just right of the center. Finally, the UEN and the EDD occupy the solid right position, with their positions being statistically indistinguishable. Similar results (not shown) were observed for Taxes versus Spending, the most important economic dimensions of policy, and for EU Authority and Immigration, the two most salient transnational issues. The most important exceptions on these dimensions were for the GUE, whose position was more pro-Integration than the mean of its national member parties, and the UEN and EDD, whose positions were considerably more extreme on antiintegration than the mean of their national member parties. On the dimensions of environmental policy and social liberalism, we also observed excellent correspondence between party group positions and the means of their national member party positions.

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6.4.2

Common Structure of Policy Contestation

One implication of the “Europeanization” of political contestation is that the organization of policy contestation between the European and national arenas should demonstrate convergence. In other words, we expect to observe that political dimensions are associated with one another in the same ways across both arenas, as European-level political contestation becomes an extension of political competition at the national level. The expert surveys provide a means to map the organization of policy contestation, using the technique of factor analysis to analyze the correlation of issue positioning with underlying factors. By estimating the number of these factors and analyzing their principal components, we can compare political contestation in both the national and European arenas. Previous research on the dimensionality of policy competition in the European political space draws mixed conclusions about whether the EU policy space is unidimensional or consists of two or possibly more dimensions. Some scholars describe the EP policy space as unidimensional, with traditional left-right or “regulation” issues dominating (Kreppel and Tsebelis 1999; Tsebelis and Garrett 2000) or with geopolitical pressures defining the principal axis of competition (Hoffman 1966; Moravcsik 1998). Other analysts depict the European policy space as consisting of two dimensions, a left-right dimension composed of economic and sociopolitical issues from the domestic arena and an orthogonal dimension of EU integration versus national sovereignty (Hix and Lord 1997). Hence, scholars disagree on whether positions on EU integration are significantly correlated with those on left-right issues (e.g., Gabel and Hix 2004; Hooghe and Marks 2001) or instead positioning on the two dimensions is independent. In table 6.3, we report the results of a principal components factor analysis that groups and separates the constituent policy dimensional scorings into orthogonal factors. For each policy variable, we observe the positions of 153 national parties as well as the positions of the 7 EP party groups. The results lend strong support to our interpretation of the structure of EU policy contestation as not only twodimensional but also similar at the national and transnational party levels. The bottom part of the table provides the varimax-rotated factor loadings for the constituent policy, with the higher rotated loadings for each of the two factors highlighted in boldface. Unlike many exploratory factor analyses, these results show a remarkably


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Table 6.3 Dimension reduction of policy contestation using principal components factor analysis Factor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Eigenvalue

Cumulative Proportion

3.23 1.46 0.65 0.34 0.23 0.07

0.54 0.78 0.89 0.95 0.99 1

Rotated Factor Loadings Factor

Taxes vs. Spending Deregulation Environment Social Immigration/Nationalism EU Authority N

1

2

0.92 0.96 0.78 0.33 0.46 –0.28

0.15 0.01 0.31 0.76 0.77 0.78 160

Note: Rotated scores use varimax rotation; variables are party mean scores. Boldface in panel 1 highlights that the two factors explain a total of 78% of the variance in the items. Boldface in panel 2 distinguishes between those items with high loadings on the first factor and those with high loadings on the second.

unambiguous result: Left and right issues cluster into two orthogonal component sets, one related to classic left-right, “domestic”-level issues from national party politics, and the second related clearly to EU and “transnational” issues such as immigration (although also including a high loading from social liberalism). The inclusion of immigration with the second “EU” factor is not surprising, since immigration and migration are closely associated with the expansion of the EU among older member states and with the issue of nationalism among the postcommunist countries. Since the policy space is structured in the same way in both the national and European arenas, we expect national and europarties to be located along the same underlying latent dimensions of policy. That this is in fact the case we observe in figure 6.2, which plots the left-right scores for each party and party group against the first factor

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20

CZ−NKL PL−UPR HU−MI...P IT−MSFT

EE−Ref

BE−FN BE−VB CY−NEO LV−TP NL−LPFCY−DISI SE−M EE−ResP SK−OKS ES−PP SI−NSiSK−KDH IT−LN NL−SGP LV−JL UK−Con NL−VVD LV−TB/LNNK SE−KD SK−ANO CY−ADIK LT−TS LT−LiCS SK−SKDU IT−FI CZ−US FI−KOK GR−ND CZ−ODS PL−PiS

LU−ADR HU−FKGP IT−AN PL−LPR FI−PS CZ−RMS HU−FIDESZ SK−SNS

EE−EKRP

15

EDD UEN

SI−SDS BE−VLD CY−EDI ES−PNV BE−N−VA SE−FPEE−Isam SI−SLS FI−SFP HU−MDF NI−UUP SK−SMK LU−DPPL−PO NL−CDAES−CiU LV−LPP LU−CSV LT−LKD PL−AWS LT−LKDS NI−DUP BE−MR IT−UDC BE−CD&V NL−CU SE−C CZ−MDS CY−KOP FI−KESK IT−Pann LT−LDP MT−NP CZ−SNK PL−UW CZ−KDU LV−ZZS UK−Lab SK−HZDS CY−DIKO BE−CDH EE−RL GR−PASOK NL−D66 SI−SNS IT−It.Val. NI−APNI HU−CENTRUM

Left-Right Score

FI−KD

PPE ELDR

10 SE−MP GR−KKE LU−G

5

NL−GL

SE−V

LU−DL

EE−M??d LT−NS/SL MT−MLP EE−Kesk SI−SMS PL−PSL IT−SDI NL−PvdA NI−SDLP FI−SDP EE−E

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