What sustains stability in legislative party systems between elections? This question commands attention given the potential for change highlighted in recent work on legislative party switching. In addressing the question, this article echoes a prominent theme in research on legislatures, parties, and party systems: the importance of the party label. The novelty here is the treatment of the individual legislator’s need for manifest loyalty to the status quo party label as the chief constraint that deters incumbents from switching and underpins stability in legislative party systems. Our theory focuses on the value of stable party affiliations to voters and thus to incumbents as well. We extract testable implications and assess hypotheses against an original cross-national dataset of over 4,300 monthly observations of MP behavior in 116 legislative terms. We find that the temporal proximity to elections deters MPs’ moves. This electoral deterrent acquires particular force under candidate-centered electoral systems

CHIARAMONTE, A. C. A. (2013). Gli sviluppi della legislazione elettorale in Italia. In AA.VV. (Ed.), Associazione per gli studi e le ricerche parlamentari. Quaderno n. 22 - Seminario 2011 (pp. 85–99). TORINO: Giappichelli.

Mughan, A. (2013). Kees Aarts, Andre Blais and Hermann Schmitt, Political leaders and democratic elections, reviewed by Anthony Mughan. Party Politics, 19(4), 683–684. http://doi.org/10.1177/1354068813485781 Vai al sito web

D’Alimonte, R., Di Virgilio, A., & Maggini, N. (2013). I risultati elettorali: bipolarismo addio? In ITANES (Ed.), Voto amaro. Disincanto e crisi economica nelle elezioni del 2013 (pp. 17–32). Bologna: Il Mulino. Retrieved from https://www.muli...

In cross-national research on party systems, the empirical units of analysis are often assumed to be self-evident, which can be conducive to misleading research results. This problem is particularly important with regard to party system classification, for which a methodologically rigorous approach to the units of analysis is needed. This article proposes a set of operational criteria for identifying elements that qualify for inclusion within the universe of democratic party systems among individual election outcomes and country-specific sequences of elections. On this basis, I introduce additional criteria for distinguishing between party systems and party non-systems, and among party systems evolving within the same nation-state settings. By applying these criteria to a set of 1502 national legislative elections held in the world’s democracies from 1792 to 2009, the article identifies 162 units that can be entered into a classification of the world’s democratic party systems and 21 party non-systems.