The Adoption of Anti-Defection Laws in Parliamentary Democracies

Abstract Over the past couple of decades a number of new democracies have adopted anti-defection laws that penalize individual parliamentary deputies for changing their partisan affiliation during the inter-election period. The adoption of these measures seems reasonable in new democracies, where political parties are still weak and are not yet “parliamentary fit” (Sartori 1997), which is an important prerequisite for the proper functioning of parliamentary government. However, it is much more puzzling to find that alone among the more established democracies, India and Israel have also chosen to do so. In this article, we argue that anti-defection laws are adopted in rare circumstances in established democracies: freely elected legislators do not easily choose to give up their freedom of movement in the legislature. In order to uncover the conditions that may lead to such reforms we compare the experience of three democracies: India and Israel, where such reforms were successfully adopted, as well as Can...