EITM: Collaborative Research on Legislative Party Switching: Integrating Formal and Comparative Empirical Analyses

立法机构的党派转换很重要。美国最近的历史证明了这一点。当杰福兹参议员2002年离开共和党，以无党派人士的身份进入参议院时，他从根本上改变了政策制定的格局。杰夫兹离开共和党，把参议院的控制权交给民主党，把一个统一的政府变成了一个分裂的政府。党派控制参议院的变化改变了政策制定和结果。因此，他的行动证明了政党的重要性，即使在美国，两个主要政党往往被视为软弱无力，基本上无法区分彼此。知识价值。各派政治学家都认为，政党对代议制民主至关重要。政党组织立法机构，明确选择，汇总偏好，最重要的是，为候选人竞选公职提供标签。学者们通常研究政党标签或政党纪律对选民决策的价值等问题，但很少研究这些问题如何影响立法者的选择。例如，研究美国政治的学生就政党对立法者投票的影响程度展开辩论，但很少有人从实证或理论上关注立法行为的其他方面，如政党归属的选择。只有少数正式的模型关注政治家的党派转换。一个更广泛但仍然有限的实证文献，其中大部分脱离了正式研究，研究了立法者在政党之间的行动。这个项目调查了政党转换的原因和后果。它试图回答这样的问题：为什么立法者会决定改变党派关系？在什么情况下，一个政党会选择接受另一个政党的叛逃者？更广泛地说，政党转换的影响是什么？这些问题的答案既能说明政党的转变，也能增进我们对政党、党的纪律和政党制度的理解。他们还将促进对相互依赖的个人决定如何相互作用以创造社会动态的理解。为了实现这一议程，该项目整合了正式和实证的方法来研究政治家对党派关系的选择和变化。共同首席研究员将建立一个政党转换的正式模型，指定该模型的可测试假设，为这些假设的实证评估制定研究设计，并在选定的国家环境中对该模型进行实证检验。他们的计划受到这样一种信念的鼓舞，即促进这一领域（以及其他领域）科学进步的关键是弥合形式分析和实证分析之间的鸿沟。工作计划。共同党派已经成功地招募了10位杰出的政治学家，以建立一个关于党派转换的研究工作组。小组成员将提出并讨论共同项目负责人的模型、假设和研究设计的改进或替代方案。他们还将评估该模型的经验合理性，检查来自广泛背景的证据，包括巴西、东欧、俄罗斯、意大利、西班牙、欧洲议会、美国和日本。工作组将于2004年夏季和2005年夏季举行两次会议。共同意见调查团将向公众提供专家组关于议员和候选人所属政党的数据集，并设法安排将专家组的论文发表在一份审定期刊的特刊上。更广泛的影响。共同赞助人和小组将有助于：(1)传播学术成果（通过发表期刊文章和共享数据库）；(2)加强研究基础设施（通过跨国界的学术合作）；(3)研究生的教学和培训（与研究生的讨论将是小组会议的一个组成部分）；(4)扩大代表性不足群体的参与（妇女占研究工作组的三分之一）。作为这个项目的一部分，我们没有直接承担本科课程开发的计划，但我们相信它可以而且应该对本科教育产生实质性的间接影响。例如，媒体对杰福兹的举动的原因和后果的大量关注，清楚地表明，政党转换是一个谜。这个项目应该有助于学者们更好地理解政党转换作为一种普遍现象。这样，他们就能更好地教导学生，为什么、何时以及如何选择党派关系，言下之意，政党关系很重要。

Party switching in legislatures is important. Recent US history drives home the point. WhenSenator Jeffords left the Republican Party in 2002 to serve in the Senate as an independent, hefundamentally altered the policy-making landscape. In leaving the Republican Party and handingcontrol of the Senate to the Democrats, Jeffords transformed a unified government into a dividedgovernment. The change in partisan control of the Senate changed policy making and outcomes. His action thus demonstrated the importance of political parties, even in the United States where the two major parties often are seen as weak and essentially indistinguishable from one another.Intellectual merit. Political scientists of all stripes agree that parties are essential to representative democracy. Parties organize legislatures, articulate choices, aggregate preferences, and, above all, provide labels under which candidates vie for public office. Scholars commonly examine such issues as the value of party labels or party discipline for voters' decision making, but rarely ask how these affect legislators' choices. Students of US politics debate the degree to which parties condition legislators' voting, for example, but few have trained either empirical or theoretical attention on such other aspects of legislative behavior as the choice of party affiliation. Only a few formal models focus on politicians' party switching. A more extensive but still limited empirical literature, most of it divorced from formal research, examines legislators' moves among parties. This project investigates the causes and consequences of party switching. It seeks to answer suchquestions as Why would a legislator decide to change party affiliation? Under what conditions would a party choose to accept a defector from another party? Most broadly, what are the effects of party switching? Answers to these questions will both illuminate party switching and advance our understanding of parties, party discipline, and party systems. They also will advance understanding of how interdependent, individual decisions interact to create a social dynamic. To pursue this agenda, the project integrates formal and empirical approaches to the study of politicians' choices of, and changes in, party affiliation. The co-Principal Investigators will build a formal model of party switching, specify the model's testable hypotheses, develop a research design for empirical evaluation of those hypotheses, and conduct empirical tests of the model in selected national settings. Their plans are animated by the conviction that the key to fostering scientific progress in this area (and others) is to bridge the chasm between formal and empirical analyses. Plan of the work. The co-PIs have successfully recruited ten prominent political scientists inorder to establish a Research Work Group on Party Switching. Group members will propose anddiscuss refinements or alternatives to the co-PIs' model, hypotheses, and research design. They also will assess the empirical plausibility of the model, examining evidence from a wide range of settings, including Brazil, Eastern Europe, Russia, Italy, Spain, the European Parliament, the United States, and Japan. The Work Group will meet twice, in summer 2004 and summer 2005. The co-PIs will make publicly available the Group's datasets on the party affiliations of legislators and candidates as well as seek to arrange publication of the Group's papers in a special issue of a refereed journal. Broader impacts. The co-PIs and the Group will contribute to: (1) the dissemination of scholarlyresults (via publication of journal articles and sharing of databases); (2) the enhancement of research infrastructure (via scholarly collaboration across national boundaries); (3) the teaching and training of graduate students (discussion with graduate students will be an integral part of the Group's meetings); and (4) the broadening of participation of underrepresented groups (women constitute one-third of the Research Work Group). We have no plans directly to undertake undergraduate curriculum development as part of this project, but we believe it can and should have (5) substantial indirect impact on undergraduate education. For example, the flurry of media attention to the causes and consequences of Jeffords's move made it clear that party switching is a puzzle. This project should help scholars better understand party switching as a general phenomenon. They then can better teach their students why, when, and how choices of party affiliation and, by implication, parties matter.