Blurring the Party Line: Multiple Affiliations and Party Choice in the French Third Republic

Stable party membership and cohesive parliamentary behavior have traditionally been considered fundamental to the development of strong political parties. Yet in both fledgling and established democracies, we often see a weakening of partisan loyalty and/or increasingly flexible partisan attachments. This paper exploits the unique case of the French Third Republic to study a context in which individual deputies were able to concurrently hold multiple affiliations in the various parliamentary factions from 1881 until 1906. This paper first examines the choice of multiple affiliations in a weak party system, and identifies the partisan and electoral conditions under which deputies were more likely to i) join multiple groups, and ii) join groups across a wide range of the ideological spectrum. I use voting cohesion over budgetary amendments to demonstrate that flexible membership in multiple parties served as a coordination device to help deputies achieve majorities for their legislative goals, and that electorally vulnerable deputies were more likely to collect affiliations as a form of endorsement. In addition, this paper examines the strategic choice of single party membership by looking at the period in which deputies were forced to choose one affiliation, from 1902-1914. I find that deputies took both the size of the party and the overall party cohesion record when choosing their primary affiliation, and these factors also influenced the rate of party switching in later years.