Why do legislators switch parties? What accounts for variation in party switching across different countries? How do electoral rules impact legislative party switching behavior and how is this behavior impacted by changes to these rules? The first chapter of this study builds on the existing body of research on the determinants of legislative party switching. More specifically, I build on the extant theories which have identified vote-, office-, and policy-seeking as motivations of legislator behavior. I examine the strategic decision making of legislators in various institutional contexts and argue that such contexts create or modify incentives and constraints that condition the decision to switch parties. Moving beyond the single country and cross-national party level analyses prevalent in the literature, this study attempts to approach party switching with a cross-national battery of variables from an original individual-level dataset. This dataset includes observations from Canada, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom from 1990-2001. I find support for vote- and policy-seeking hypotheses as well as district and system level institutional variables. In order to investigate how electoral rules impact party switching behavior, the second section of this study focuses on New Zealand and the evolution of its electoral system. These changes include a transition from a pure single-member district (SMD) electoral system to a mixed-member (MM), compensatory proportional representation system in 1996. Preliminary evidence suggests that the change to a MM electoral system is associated with a rise in the frequency of legislative party switching in New Zealand's House of Representatives. Additionally, there is evidence that party switching legislators are motivated by vote-seeking concerns over reelection.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-06072017-160253 |
| Date | 13 June 2017 |
| Creators | Knott, Cassie Millet |
| Contributors | Kerevel, Yann, Tirone, Daniel, Garand, James |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-06072017-160253/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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