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What are the causal effects of legislative party switching on campaign fundraising? Using a selection-on-observables strategy (a first in the study of U.S. party switchers), we demonstrate that relative to other similarly situated legislators, party switchers rely more heavily on partisan and ideological, out-of-district individual donors, and direct party contributions. In short, switchers—in trying to alleviate the electoral costs of switching—rely disproportionately on donors motivated to protect vulnerable incumbents of a particular party. We conclude with a discussion of how these dynamics reinforce partisan polarization and raise normative questions about representation and the role of the "surrogate constituency." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of party switchers in the Canadian House of Commons. With the most extensive dataset on party-switching MPs (1867–2015), we answer the following questions: What are the electoral trajectories of party switchers? Have their prospects changed over time? We assess whether the historical dynamics of the Canadian party system explain changes in the incidence and fate of party switchers since 1867, hypothesizing that both the rate of party switching and the electoral fortunes of floor crossers decline over time. The evidence accords with our second hypothesis more strongly than our first. Party switching has become slightly less common, but the electoral consequence has become much more severe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine constituency changes induced by redistricting and ask three questions:What explains the amount of instability and uncertainty induced by redistricting? Does uncertainty affect legislators’ career choices? How do these changes affect election outcomes? The authors show that partisan redistricting plans are able to produce significant instability between elections, especially for opposing-party incumbents. Their findings have important implications for representation: through redistricting, strategic actors can disrupt the stability that many theorists would consider paramount for the operation of a democratic republic. The authors show that the effects of redistricting go beyond the simple examination of changes in each district’s underlying partisanship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Committee rapporteurs are central to decision making in many multiparty legislatures. It is not clear, however, whether these rapporteurs are best characterized as partisan animals or technical experts seeking consensus in nonmajoritarian institutions. We addressed this question by examining which members of the European Parliament become repeat rapporteurs. Using an original dataset comprising all committee reports from the 4th and 5th European Parliaments (1994-2004), we found that the report allocation process provides a way to pursue partisan policy goals within a multiparty, consensual institution that rewards both coalition building and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can partisan mapmakers enact a partisan gerrymander in the presence of risk-averse co-partisan incumbents who wish to keep most of their constituencies intact? Until now the literature on redistricting has focused on how redistricting affects the geography of partisan support, that is, the underlying partisan balance of electoral districts. We posit that this emphasis on partisanship misses half of the story. Partisan mapmakers have another tool at their disposal: the fostering of population instability that may not affect a district''s partisan balance. By examining all redistricting plans enacted in 2001–2002, as well as three case studies, we show that partisan mapmakers strategically foster population instability, which poses problems for incumbents in a way that may not be apparent when looking exclusively at the effects of redistricting on partisanship. Our results show how partisan mapmakers simultaneously achieve two goals: enacting an “optimal gerrymander,” which strengthens some opposition-party incumbents, while inducing instability and reducing the personal vote of those same incumbents. We also show that so-called “neutral” redistricting plans are successful in disregarding incumbency. Finally, our results suggest another mechanism that explains why the 2002 congressional elections in the U.S. produced little competition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]