Legislative Party Switching as a Strategy of Political Survival: Evidence from Slovakia

This paper examines legislative party switching in the Slovak National Council through the lens of political survival and career-oriented strategic adaptation. While existing research on party switching has convincingly identified its key drivers—most notably office-seeking, policy-seeking, and vote-seeking motivations—it has predominantly focused on the immediate causes and institutional correlates of party switching behaviour. Less attention has been paid to what party switching does for legislators over time, particularly in terms of their subsequent re-election prospects. This paper seeks to address this gap by reframing legislative party switching as a forward-looking, pragmatic strategy aimed at maximising political survival. The study draws on an original dataset of 750 MP mandates (422 actual MPs) across five legislative terms in Slovakia between 2006 and 2023, focusing on all recorded parliamentary party switchers. Slovakia represents a particularly suitable research setting due to its high levels of electoral volatility, a strongly personalised electoral system, and the recurrent presence of weakly institutionalised, entrepreneurial, and socially unrooted parties. In such an environment, MPs face heightened uncertainty regarding the longevity of their party, electoral viability, and future access to political resources, which may intensify incentives for strategic party switching. The analysis proceeds by analyzing three categories of MPs - non-switchers, individual switchers, and collective switchers, comparing their electoral trajectories. Concretely, the paper looks into MPs’ post-switch political career outcomes, focusing on whether these different types of party switching increases the likelihood of (a) becoming a candidate again, (b) re-election, and (c) receiving more preferential votes in subsequent electoral cycles. Our paper contributes to the literature by conceptualizing legislative party switching not merely as an expression of short-term incentives or ideological repositioning, but as a strategic individual effort to secure continued parliamentary representation. By situating the Slovak case within broader debates on party system institutionalization and elite behaviour in Central and Eastern Europe, the paper offers insights relevant to comparative research on legislative mobility in volatile and fragmented party systems.