Introduction
This paper deals with an aspect of electoral systems, which has so far attracted less than
overwhelming scholarly attention, although the political phenomenon linked to this aspect has
haunted numerous post-colonial societies in their attempt to consolidate parliamentary
democracy and still is of great significance as regards the bulk of Third Wave democracies:
the question of ‘floor crossing’ or – in a less procedural sense - ‘politics of defection’ to use
the famous phrase, with which Subhash Kashyap (1969) in one of the rare scholarly attempts
to tackle the phenomenon analytically was describing the staggering number of changes of
party affiliation or allegiance by elected representatives that seriously altered the course of
post-independent India’s evolution of party politics and the party system.
While almost all features and technical details of electoral systems have been covered by the
vast literature on constitutional engineering for nascent democracies
floor crossing should be allowed in the name of the individual parliamentarian’s ‘freedom of
conscience’ and primary accountability, or, whether anti-defection regulations should be
imposed in order to guarantee regime stability and proportional representation rarely finds its
way into academic research and scholarly debate going beyond everyday political discussion
and public discourse.
This is striking, for (the politics of) floor crossing/defection can and do act in a distorting and
discriminatory manner as regards electoral outcomes with often devastating consequences. On
the other hand, where anti-defection legislation is imposed and floor crossing becomes a
matter of legal control, very often a mockery is made out of the Burkean notion of a
Defections were, for example, for the most part responsible for the decline of Congress
dominance in India from the late 1960s onwards as well as for the period of fragile coalition
1
In this paper the terms floor crossing and defection are used synonymously. Strictly speaking, the term floor
crossing – deriving from the spatial distribution of government and opposition in the British House of Commons
- is confined to the movement of a legislator from the opposition to the government or vice versa. Since
defections involving other constituents of the party system/parliament than government and/or opposition can
have serious consequences as well and any democratically established anti-defection legislation confined to the
meaning of floor crossing in strictu sensu would be discriminatory and violative of constitutional rationality in
terms of equality before the law, it seems reasonable to refer to both terms synonymously.
2
In the South African context, for example, the academic literature on constitutional engineering with special
regard to the electoral system is abundant; see Lijphart (1985, 1990 and 1991) as main references; see also
Horowitz (1991) for the argument of Lijphart’s main scholarly opponent. A comprehensive summary of the
scholarly debate about the pros and cons of the various electoral systems with regard to South Africa and the
Southern African region is given in Reynolds (1991, 1993 and 1999); an overview of the electoral reform debate
in South Africa is given in Krennerich and deVille (1997).
2
Convention