Abstract
Despite the vast literature on constitutional engineering for nascent democracies in changing
societies covering almost all aspects of electoral systems as potentially beneficial for or
detrimental to democratic consolidation and/or regime stability, the question whether floor
crossing should be allowed or anti-defection regulations should be imposed has attracted less
than overwhelming scholarly attention.
This is striking, since the problem of defections has haunted numerous post-colonial societies
and still is of great significance as regards the bulk of the Third Wave democracies. Floor
crossing can seriously alter the party political power configurations in a given polity with
sometimes devastating consequences for regime stability and/or democratic accountability.
Defections were, for example, for the most part responsible for the decline of Congress
dominance in India from the late 1960s onwards, and the recent passing of legislation to
permit floor crossing in South Africa was brought about by and has resulted in a strange
coalition of the ANC and NNP – the latter being the party whose antecedent had invented and
implemented apartheid - thus reinforcing the image and political structure of the country as
an emerging one-party dominant state.
However, floor crossing is also not necessarily always undesirable. Where constituency
systems entail the election of representatives as individuals, the ‘freedom of conscience’ may
be an essential part of the principle of primary accountability.
A comparison between India, which had started her democratic career with no constitutional
provision to prohibit floor crossing and had introduced an anti-defection law in 1985 ruling
out individual defections but still permitting en bloc defections, and South Africa, where an
initial anti-defection clause had been gradually undermined in the course of 2002 to the point
that floor crossing is now possible at all three legislative levels within specified time frames,
can thus be a telling exploration as to a) what the Indian experience may hold as a lesson for
the current debate in South Africa, and b) as to what extent the difference in the two
respective electoral systems (a simple plurality constituency system in India and a closed list
proportional representation system in South Africa) proscribes a different approach to the
debate of floor crossing vs. anti-defection laws anyway.
1
Convention