Parliamentary Cycles and Party Switching in Legislatures

• Date: 01 January 2008
• Published date: 01 January 2008
• Author: Olga Shvetsova,Carol Mershon
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414007303651
• Subject Matter: Articles

Parliamentary Cycles

and Party Switching in

Legislatures

Carol Mershon

University of Virginia, Charlottesville

Olga Shvetsova

Binghamton University, New York

This article examines politicians’ changes of party labels during the life of a

legislature. The authors view a legislator’s choice of party as a strategic deci-

sion recurring throughout the parliamentary cycle. In their approach, individu-

als are open to switching parties as they pursue goals specific to the stage in the

parliamentary cycle. Analyzing Italy and Russia, they identify among legisla-

tors in both countries patterns of heightened switching for office benefits,

policy advantage, and vote seeking at distinctive moments in the parliamentary

cycle. The commonalities across the two systems provide compelling support

for their theoretical framework. The evidence also points to a midterm peak in

switching in both countries. Differences appear, however, in the timing of

preelectoral positioning—contrasts that the authors attribute to differences in

the degree of party system institutionalization, the age of the democratic

regimes, and thus the information available to players in electoral politics.

Keywords: legislative parties; party switching; Russia; Italy; parliamentary

cycle; midterm effect

Competition among elites for popular support, along with widely shared

rights to participate in the selection of representatives, defines a demo-

cratic regime (Dahl, 1970). Political parties organize the teams and terms

of elite competition and thus offer and defend alternative choices to voters.

Parties also organize the agenda and work of legislatures and thus translate

citizen preferences into policy decisions. Fittingly, one of the most fre-

quently cited judgments in political science is that democracy without

parties is “unthinkable” (Schattschneider, 1942, p. 1).

A standard assumption in the vast literature on parties and legislative

politics is that parties operate as fixed units from one election to the next.

Recently, however, a small, still-growing body of research has emerged to

challenge that conventional wisdom and to investigate changes in party

Comparative Political Studies

Volume 41 Number 1

January 2008 99-127

© 2008 Sage Publications

10.1177/0010414007303651

http://cps.sagepub.com

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99

affiliation among elected legislators and candidates for legislative office

(e.g., Heller & Mershon, 2004; Laver & Benoit, 2003). Contributors to this

school have documented and sought to explain frequent party switch-

ing among legislators in both new and established democracies, including

Australia (Miskin, 2003), Brazil (Desposato, 2006), the European Parliament

(McElroy, 2003), Hungary (Àgh, 1999), India (Miskin, 2003), and the United

States during periods of realignment (Canon & Sousa, 1992; Nokken & Poole,

2004).

Notwithstanding the achievements of studies on party switching, none to

date has tied the phenomenon to the stage in the parliamentary cycle. In

particular, no study so far has explored whether patterns differ systemati-

cally across distinct stages of the legislative term—across, for instance, one

stage devoted to committee assignments early in the term and another at the

end of the term, dominated by the view of elections on the horizon. That is

what this article does.

We examine politicians’ choices—and changes—of party labels during

the legislative term, in different stages of the parliamentary cycle. As we

define it, the parliamentary cycle includes legislative stages and also the elec-

toral stage that occurs before or during the official campaign for the next legis-

lature and that, assuming backward induction, affects behavior in the term. The

next section elaborates on this conception of the parliamentary cycle and

hypothesizes that the cycle leaves its imprint on switching behavior. Third, we

outline our research design, specifying our operationalization of stages and our

rationale for studying Italy and Russia. Fourth, we assess our hypotheses

against data from the 1996-2001 Italian Chamber of Deputies and the 1993-

1995 Russian Duma. The fifth part draws out the implications of our study.

The Parliamentary Cycle:

Stages, Motives, and Behavior

In our approach, individuals can change their choice of parties as they pur-

sue the goals of the moment—goals specific to the stage in the parliamentary

100 Comparative Political Studies

Authors’Note: Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2005 Workshop of the Party

Switching Research Group, Charlottesville; the 2005 Midwest Political Science Association

annual convention, Chicago; and the 2005 International Studies Association annual convention,

Honolulu. We thank Rado Iliev for research assistance and Will Heller and other members of

the Party Switching Research Group for rich and probing conversations about party switching.

We are also grateful to John Aldrich,Jim Caporaso, Mikhail Filippov, Rado Iliev, Tim Nokken,

Lucio Renno, and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the article. The first

author acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Grant SES-0339877.