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Legislation preventing legislators from changing political parties in the Indian Parliament, effective Mar. 1985.

A member of the Indian parliament who changes his political party is praised by some for having the courage of his conviction, and censured by others as a turncoat or an opportunist. The Indian Parliament has now legislated firmly against the practice, regardless of the motives of those involved. This measures was necessary in India, and is perhaps as unique piece of legislation in parliamentary democracies. (Internat. Polit. Science Assoc.)

AbstractAre anti-defection laws efficient? Many parliamentary democracies have enacted anti-defection laws to prevent frequent government collapses and political instability. Using the anti-defection law in India as a reference, I argue that the party-based anti-defection laws enacted in many Westminster-style Parliamentary democracies do not achieve their goals, yet drastically impact representative decision-making. I show how the entitlements and protections granted by anti-defection laws to political parties and legislators do not achieve the purpose of maintaining government stability and suggest two options to improve it.

Anti-defection laws are laws by which members of parliaments (MPs) who changed their party affiliation or voted against the position of their political faction or independent MPs who joined a political party are forced to vacate their parliamentary seat or prohibited from nomination as candidates of another political party in the next election. The essence of anti-defection laws is restricting political party members' freedom to change their party affiliation to prevent government parties' loss of majority in the parliament. Anti-defection laws are not uniformly used. While many established democracies see parliamentary defection as a manifestation of democracy, other jurisdictions with undeveloped democracies have outlawed defection. In Ethiopia, the FDRE Constitution entitles MPs to be led by the Constitution itself, peoples' will, and their conscience, not necessarily by their party line. Accordingly, MPs can opine and vote contrary to the views of the political party of their membership in parliamentary debates; they can even change their party affiliation without risk of losing their parliamentary mandate. This makes Ethiopia one of the countries without anti-defection laws.

Despite considerable progress in the study of party switching, scholarly interest in institutional constraints explicitly designed to limit or penalise inter-party mobility remains limited in the literature. This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on party switching and legal institutional constrains by assessing the effectiveness of the new anti-defection regulations introduced in the Italian Senate starting from 2018. To evaluate the impact of this intervention, we develop two quasi-experimental research approaches that take advantage of the bicameral structure of the Italian Parliament and the fact that the anti-defection regulations were only implemented in the Senate and not in the Chamber of Deputies. Our results indicate that anti-defection regulations failed both to limit inter-party mobility and the formation of new legislative parties. However, they results effective in influencing the timing of party switching, concentrating it in the phases of government formation and dissolution.

THE WORST FORM OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION IN INDIA HAS BEEN THE PERNICIOUS AND OUTRAGEOUS PHENOMENON OF DEFECTIONS. SINCE THE 1967 GENERAL ELECTIONS, MORE THAN FOUR THOUSAND AYA RAMS AND GAYA RAMS HAVE CHANGED PARTIES IN THE VARIOUS STATES, MAINLY TO BECOME CHIEF MINISTERS, MINISTERS, AND CHAIRMEN OF PUBLIC SECTOR CORPORATIONS. THE DEBASING PRACTICE, WHICH PUTS A PRICE TAG ON LEGISLATORS, IS USED AS MUCH TO CAPTURE POWER AS TO TOPPLE GOVERNMENTS AND SUBVERT THE ELECTORAL MANDATE.