In many countries legislators switch parties between elections. This raises normative concerns related to issues of representation and accountability. To date, the literature explains party switching almost exclusively in terms of the factors that lead a legislator to want to change party. However, this approach ignores the fact that we only observe party switching when a legislator wants to switch parties and when a party is willing to accept the legislator. In this dissertation, I present a formal model of party switching that recognizes the strategic nature of this two-way interaction. My model demonstrates that many of the factors commonly thought to influence party switching actually have opposing effects on the potential defecting legislator and potential target party. This helps to explain many of the inconsistent and conflicting results in the existing literature. Using original data from Brazil and Romania that I collected myself, as well as a new partial observability maximum likelihood model that I developed to specifically analyze party switching, I find strong support for my model's predictions. My large N quantitative analyses are supplemented by more qualitative evidence derived from interviews that I conducted with leading political figures in Romania during my field research. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2013. / July 5, 2013. / accountability, democratic representation, electoral rules, partial
observability logit, party switching / Includes bibliographical references. / Matt Golder, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Christopher Reenock, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Irinel Chiorescu, University Representative; David A. Siegel, Committee Member; Mark Souva, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_183865 |
| Contributors | Radean, Marius (authoraut), Golder, Matt (professor co-directing thesis), Reenock, Christopher (professor co-directing thesis), Chiorescu, Irinel (university representative), Siegel, David A. (committee member), Souva, Mark (committee member), Department of Political Science (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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