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

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Abstract

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

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Fig. 1

Predicted probabilities are calculated using the mgen command (Long and Freese 2014)

Fig. 2

The graph is created with the code provided by Brambor et al. (2006)

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Notes

  1. Party discipline in Turkey is in general quite strong (Aleskerov et al. 2000; Turan 2003) although some (in)famous cases of party defection can be found, such as the vote in March 2003 to permit the United States to deploy its troops through Turkey at the onset of the Iraq War (Kesgin and Kaarbo 2010).

  2. In the period of analysis, Turkey had a PR system with a 10% ten percent national threshold. The seats were allocated according to d’Hondt formula. Preferential vote was used only in 1991.

  3. Since we are also interested in explaining factors behind the timing of switches we follow the design of Desposato (2006) rather than looking at whether a legislator has ever switched her party (Heller and Mershon 2005).

  4. Since the decision in a particular month might be correlated with the decision in the previous month, we also conducted the empirical analysis with splines. The results are similar and available upon request.

  5. A list of party acroynms is included in the Online Appendix.

  6. Some MPs drop out of analysis because of death or termination of their MP position. This is the main reason why the number of observations is not equal to 68,050. Data are missing in a few cases. Footnote 11 and the Online Appendix provide information on missing data.

  7. For coding criteria in exceptional cases, such as leaving a party and then going back to the original party, please see the Online Appendix.

  8. As a robustness test, we use four or five deputies as the cut-off point. The results are similar and available upon request.

  9. Owing to the small number of switches in this large dataset, we also conduct rare events logit analysis. The results are robust to the use of this alternative method and available upon request.

  10. Descriptive statistics are available on the Online Appendix.

  11. District level electoral data can be found at the TUIK (Turkish Statistical Institute) website: http://www.tuik.gov.tr/secimdagitimapp/secim.zul.

  12. Since we do not have vote shares for new parties that had not participated in the elections, we exclude those cases from analysis.

  13. Only two parliamentarians belonged to YDH. One member switched to this party from SHP in February 1995 and remained with the party until the elections in December 1995. The other member switched from DYP in November and was affiliated with the party for only 2 months.

  14. In other models we also added the position of the MP on the party’s list and information on whether she was a “quota” candidate in the 1991 elections. Kselman (2009) argues and finds that position on the list is associated with the likelihood of switching. We observe that our findings are robust to the addition of these two variables. The results are available upon request.

  15. Data on legislators’ previous experience as mayor is gathered from the Meclis Albumu (Parliamentary Annual), published by the Secretariat of the TGNA (Turkish Grand National Assembly).

  16. The parliamentary website provides the list of cabinet members. (http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/hukumetler/hukumetler.htm).

  17. Population and GDP data are available on the TUIK website: http://www.tuik.gov.tr/VeriBilgi.do?tb_id=56&ust_id=16.

  18. It can be argued that legislators actually are making a choice between three different options: staying with the party, changing to another party individually, or switching to another party as part of a faction. We explore this possibility by conducting a multinomial logit analysis. The results are similar and available upon request.

  19. When we exclude the large factional move from DSP to YDH in 2002 from the analysis, the magnitude of the center-left party coefficient declines, but a weakly statistically significant effect remains. The results are available upon request.

  20. We also investigate the possibility that the removal of the constitutional limit on party switching might have had an impact by including an indicator variable that takes on the value of one starting with August 1995. To check whether instability in the wider political or economic environment might have affected legislators’ behavior, we control for currency devaluations and the indirect military intervention of February 1997. The results are similar and available on request.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was previously presented at the Midwest Political Association Meeting in Chicago, March 2011. We are grateful to Melis Nazlı for her able help with data collection and the conference participants for their feedback. We also thank Abdurahman Aydemir and Kerim Can Kavakli who provided valuable suggestions on the statistical analysis, the participants of our expert survey on party positions, and the two anonymous referees.

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  1. Sabancı University, Orta Mahalle, 34956, Tuzla, İstanbul, Turkey

    Özge Kemahlıoğlu & Sabri Sayarı

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  1. Özge Kemahlıoğlu
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Correspondence to Özge Kemahlıoğlu.

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Kemahlıoğlu, Ö., Sayarı, S. Defecting alone or splitting together? Individual and collective party switching by legislators. Public Choice 171, 187–206 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-017-0433-0

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