ABSTRACT
This chapter examines party switching in the European Parliament as an interesting manifestation of intra-party competition. As a general phenomenon, party switching has received relatively little attention in the canon of political parties. Switching by legislators is generally viewed as an aberration, an indicator of a weak, ill-formed party system; a pathology associated with newly emerging or unstable democracies. Recent research, however, has challenged the conventional wisdom that switching is an exceptional occurrence. These studies have demonstrated that party switching is a relatively common experience in many democracies, including Italy (Heller and Mershon 2005), Japan (Reed and Scheiner 2003), Ecuador (Meija-Acosta 1999), Poland (Benoit and Hayden 2004) and Brazil (Desposato 2006).
