ABSTRACT
This introduction offers a comprehensive overview of this book, concentrating on legislative party switching within three Central and Eastern European parliaments: Czech, Lithuanian, and Polish. It articulates the main arguments, outlines this book’s structure, and elucidates the rationale behind selecting the analysed cases. Additionally, it introduces crucial terms like parliamentary volatility, depot of switchers, and bypass for switchers. Special attention is devoted to the regional specificity in measuring legislative party switching. The adopted terminological conventions are substantiated. The introduction encompasses a description of the procedure for acquiring data from individual parliaments and an exposition on the structure of the unique database dedicated to legislative party switching within the analysed parliaments.
