Replication Data for: No "I" In Team - Party Defectors Data

Our investigation sets out to address our overarching research question: why are most Canadian parliamentarians so loyal to their party? As a subset to this, we want to understand the institutional forces fuelling expectations that everyone in Canadian party politics must be a team player. This involves looking into the psychology of group loyalty and team constructs, and what workplace relations can inform us about behaviour in partisan groups. We are curious about the ways that loyalty is conditioned among election candidates, rookie parliamentarians and party veterans and, relatedly, what levers of power a leader has available to command loyalty, and why party loyalty is more impenetrable in some provinces than in others.

To answer this question, we have created a dataset of parliamentarians who exited a party caucus in Canada from 1980 to 2021 and who continued sitting either as an Independent and/or joined a different caucus during that Parliament. We identified 349 cases involving 333 politicians who sat after departing their caucus voluntarily or through expulsion between January 1, 1980, and December 31, 2021, some of whom did so more than once. We documented names, year of exit, year of defection (if applicable), years in office, province, gender, age and the political parties involved. We cross-referenced our list with an existing database of Canadian party switchers.

Each was coded and augmented by a synthesis of over 3,000 news stories into 333 briefing notes about the controversial behaviour of every party leaver we identified from 1980 to 2021.