Party switching occurs quite commonly in Brazil,[1] India, Italy, Romania, Ukraine,[citation needed] and the Philippines.
The trend still continues to surface every now and then, by exploiting the loopholes in existing anti-defection laws to benefit a specific party through further horse-trading, counter-defections, formation of unholy alliances and electoral fraud.
The term was coined when Gaya Lal, a Member of the Legislative Assembly from Hodal in Haryana, won elections as an independent candidate in 1967 and joined the Indian National Congress, and thereafter he changed parties thrice in a fortnight, first by politically defecting from the Indian National Congress to the United Front, then counter defecting back to INC, and then counter-counter-defected within nine hours to United Front again.
This triggered the worst cyclic game of the political defections, the counter-defections, the counter-counter-defections, and so on, eventually resulting in the dissolution of the Haryana Legislative Assembly and the President's rule was imposed.
The Anti-defection Act, applicable to both Parliament and state assemblies, specifies the process for the Presiding Officer of a legislature (Speaker) to disqualify a legislators on grounds of defection based on a petition by any other member of the House.
This allows a possibility of the misuse by the Presiding Officer to benefit a specific party through further horse-trading (counter-defections), formation of unholy alliances or electoral fraud by exploiting the loopholes in the existing anti-defection laws.
In Italy, party-switching is more common than in other Western European parliamentary democracies, with nearly 25% of members of the Italian Chamber of Deputies switching parties at least once during the 1996 to 2001 legislative term.
[5] A 2004 article in the Journal of Politics posited that party-switching in Italy "most likely is motivated by party labels that provide little information about policy goals and that pit copartisans against each other in the effort to serve constituent needs.
[9][10] A private members' bill to repeal the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Act 2018 was considered in 2020 but was defeated in June 2021.
Party-switching "has become the norm, the practice" in the Philippines, according to Julio Teehankee, a political science professor at De La Salle University.
Vice President Jejomar Binay, elected under PDP–Laban, formed his own United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) as his party for his 2016 presidential campaign.
However, members of the State Duma considered an independent politician may be permitted to join and switch to a party at any time.
[13] This was evident during the 2007 Ukrainian political crisis where members of the opposition crossed party lines with plans to undermine Presidential authority and move towards the 300 constitutional majority.
[24] Another notable example is when in April 2009, Arlen Specter, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, switched to the Democratic Party.