EXPLORING PARTY SWITCHING IN THE POST-1989 ROMANIAN POLITICIANS NETWORK FROM A COMPLEX NETWORK PERSPECTIVE.

• Author: Fierascu, Silvia I.
• Position: Report

Introduction

In party-dominated political systems with proportional representation (PR) with closed list electoral systems, individual members of parliament (MPs) have incentives to stay loyal to the organizations that brought them to parliament. Party discipline is typically high in such systems, and defections are relatively rare (Grose and Yoshinaka, 2003; Shabad and Slomczynski, 2004; Mershon and Shvetsova, 2008; Janda, 2009; Stefan, Gherghina and Chiru, 2012; O'Brien and Shomer, 2013; Martin, Saalfeld and Strom, 2014). However, occasionally, there are MPs who, for various reasons, fall out with their political organizations and seek better matching parties to secure their career development, or achieve ideological or policy goals. In Eastern and Southern Europe, these movements have been shown to be more frequent than in typical Western contexts (Heller and Mershon, 2009; Volpi, 2018).

Sometimes, MPs' decision to defect comes as a direct response to crises faced by their political parties (Kreuzer and Pettai, 2003; Thames, 2007). Other times, they come incrementally with their development as seasoned political representatives (Gherghina, 2016; Mershon and Shvetsova, 2009; Heller and Mershon, 2005). Yet other times, they are slowly marginalized by their groups for not fitting the ideological or policy profile of the organization (Desposato, 2006; Owens, 2003; Bozoki and Ishiyama, 2002). Either way, defector MPs are support votes lost by one party and won by the receiving party on the roll call voting floor.

In general, there is little attention given to party switchers. The phenomenon is rare enough and the populations small enough to barely be relevant for traditional statistical analysis, yet large enough to deter systematic qualitative approaches (Heller and Mershon, 2009; Volpi, 2018). We argue that the network approach to studying party switchers brings both the quantitative quality to the analysis that is not affected by the size of the population, while also providing some micro-and macrolevel qualitative context, previously overlooked with more traditional approaches.

The science of complex networks offers a new and fresh perspective on human interactions across a diverse range of scientific fields. The focus is put on areas in which social network analysis (Carrington, Scott and Wasserman, 2005; Borgatti et al., 2009) and political science overlap (Lazer et al., 2009; Gerber, Henry and Lubell, 2013; Dal Maso et al., 2014). Thus, it is made possible to analyze the dynamics of local-level interactions (e.g., strategic decisions of MPs) and emergent phenomena at the global level (e.g., the cohesiveness of the parliamentary party system). A powerful tool employed by network science is centrality analysis (Wasserman and Faust, 1994), through which nodes are assigned a meaningful importance in the network configuration. To this end, we propose the usage of PageRank (Page, 1999) to measure the importance of a party switcher in the context of the parliamentary network of party members.

Network analysis has been used in legislative studies in the past 10 years, significantly contributing to the collective knowledge and understanding of MPs' structural, organizational and inter-personal interdependency and role within dynamic networks of policy and politics. However, most of them are focused on other types of legislative collaboration, such as co-sponsorship of legislation (Fowler, 2006; Bratton and Rouse, 2011; Kirkland and Gross, 2014), information exchange (Ringe, Victor, and Gross, 2013), policy innovation (Mintrom and Vergari, 1998), or friendships (Kirkland, 2011), mostly in the US context, and we are not currently aware of any study examining the problem of party switching from a network perspective in the European context (i.e., exploring or testing network dynamics of politicians' shared party memberships).

Literature on the effects of defector MPs on party discipline and support in various contexts has previously shown that these individuals bring a series of benefits to the receiving parties, from social and political networks, to funding opportunities, and a personalized vote from constituencies, based on their experience in office, time in politics and their personal and political popularity with the electorate (Olson, 1998; Tavits, 2005; Tavits, 2009; Gherghina and Jiglau, 2011). On the other hand, they were also found to bring some negative aspects with them--lack of credibility in the eyes of the electorate, depending on the timing of the switch, and lack of trustworthiness, depending on the frequency of their switching between parties (Gherghina and Chiru, 2014; Desposato, 2004; Tavits, 2008).

Thus, the receiving parties of defector MPs have to balance between the benefits and the burdens they take in together with a particular MP. In theory, MPs can opt to join any political party at any time, without much justification, except for those appropriate for their electors. In practice however, there are strong incentives of MPs to join parties strategically, in order to get support from the party leadership for re-election (Klein, 2016a; Klein, 2016b; Stefan, Gherghina and Chiru, 2012; Heller and Mershon, 2008), to further their political career in public office (Pinto, 2015; Owens, 2003), or to gain more credibility on a personal vote (Tavits, 2005; McMenamin and Gwiazda, 2011).

There are thus two overlapping processes that happen with respect to party switchers: on the one hand, there is the strategic decision of MPs to join certain parties, to further their personal agendas; on the other hand, there is the strategic decision of receiving parties to support defector MPs for re-election on their lists, to further their political agendas. We thus ask the following questions:

(a) Are the strategic decisions of defector MPs motivated by party performance? In other words, are defector MPs motivated by the performance of the receiving parties or by the prospects of the parties they intend to leave behind?

(b) What are the micro-level effects of individual MPs' strategic decisions to move from one party to another at the macro-level--the parliamentary party scene?

To answer these questions, in this paper, we pursue two aims: 1) to explore the temporal dynamics of strategic choices of MPs who defect from one political party and join other parties over the course of their careers in the Romanian Parliament. And 2) to explore the temporal dynamics of strategic choices of parliamentary parties that receive defector MPs and support them for re-election on their lists. This is an initial exploratory study of the phenomenon of party switching using network analytical concepts and tools. More traditional approaches to determinants of party switching at the individual and party levels are not our concern in this study.

Although the populations for such a study are generally small, they are significant in political systems characterized by: (i) issue polarization, where every support vote counts both for passing legislation, as well as for getting parties the electoral and public credibility backed by political elites (Olson, 1998; Tavits, 2005; Tavits, 2009; Gherghina and Jiglau, 2011); (ii) cartel parties, where parties depend and actively seek state resources--professional politicians being a key part of the resource pools of cartel parties (Chiru, and Ciobanu, 2009; Bozoki and Ishiyama, 2002); (iii) parliamentary and government coalitions (especially minority coalitions), where every resource at hand is valuable for maintaining a working majority and avoiding decision blockages (Gherghina and Jiglau, 2011; Stefan, Gherghina and Chiru, 2012; Tavits, 2005).

Since the fall of communism in Romania, in December 1989, the country has taken decisive steps into developing a competitive multi-party system and an active civil society. For the last 28 years a lot of changes had taken place on the political scene of Romania, such as the creation of new parties and dissolution of others, people leaving certain political parties to create new ones, or even people switching to a party representing the opposing ideology of his/her previous party. In this paper, we explore the landscape of post-1989 Romanian politics that reflects such dynamics.

Romania is an appropriate case to study for several reasons. First, the multi-party scene in this post-communist country has been relatively small and stable, with about five political actors who have secured leadership of the country from 1990 until today. There were some mergers, splits and fusions on the political scene, but the five large actors have been the ones dominating the political game for the past 27 years (Gherghina and Chiru, 2014) (5).

Second, these actors have more or less reliably alternated in office from one election to the other, even though the electoral turnover in Romania was not as clear-cut as in other post-communist countries, such as Hungary in the first 20 years, due to the many electoral and cabinet coalitions formed, in order to secure either parliamentary majority or some forms of governing consensus. Sometimes, these coalitions would be among political parties with ideologically opposing views. Given however the migration of political party attitudes increasingly towards to center of the ideological spectrum on policy issues, these coalitions were possible in the first place (Gherghina and Jiglau, 2011; Tavits, 2008; Dal Maso et al., 2014).

Third, precisely because of this dynamic game of coalitions, defector MPs play an important role, since they can destabilize or de facto stabilize fragile political arrangements, and they can act strategically using temporal momentum in political crises and on key issues.

Strategic decisions and unintended consequences

The literature in political science is mostly concerned with the strategic choices of defector MPs or those of the receiving parties to justify their acceptance. We are however...