Sometimes You Cannot Have It All: Party Switching and Affiliation Motivations as Substitutes

Existing research on when legislators switch parties reports inconsistent results about motivations for switching (e.g., office, ideology, and votes). I treat the motivations for party switching as substitutes and argue that many of the inconsistencies that persist can be explained by modelling the interactive effects between these motivations. For example, scholars differ in terms of whether they find that electoral considerations are an important determinant of party switching. The conflicting findings on the independent effects of electoral considerations are explained here by demonstrating that these effects are conditional on the level of office benefits a legislators enjoys, as well as the ideological distance between the legislator and party. More generally, the empirical analysis provides strong support for the substitution effect hypothesis. Thus, modelling interactive effects increases our understanding of party switching

Analysing constitutional reform in Britain: Insights from economic approaches

Over the last decade, the British state has been profoundly restructured. These changes challenge scholars to develop accounts capable of providing a unified analysis of the various reforms and of enabling their effects to be identified. While there is now a large literature on constitutional change in Britain, most of these studies focus on individual institutions and neglect the reforms’ collective nature and effects. To develop a more unified analysis of the reforms and their consequences, we need an account of what institutions are and of how they work. Economic analyses of institutions provide such an account, helping us to identify the common operating logics that underpin different institutions along with their effects. Insights from the economic approach to institutions are drawn on to explore how the constitutional reforms in Britain affect the distribution of decision-making authority and the nature of political accountability