This paper approaches the question of political personalization through the prism of legislative and electoral party switching, i.e. voluntary changes in the party label of elected representatives in an inter-election period. Most studies on legislative party switching have tended to adopt an institutional approach either by taking political parties as their unit of analysis (O’Brien and Shomer 2013) or by studying the aggregate rates and patterns of inter-party movement in legislative assemblies between two consecutive elections (Mershon and Shvetsova 2013). In contrast to these perspective, this paper takes an individual-centered approach by trying to understand which particular members in a democratic legislature are more likely decide to exit from their political party while others remain loyal. The paper develops the hypothesis that there is a mid-career conditioning effect that makes junior and senior politicians to be especially prone to engage in party exit, holding all else equal, while mid-career politicians will tend to be loyaI. In contrast to their junior and senior colleagues, mid-career representatives are more likely to resort to the option of ‘voice’ in order to register their dissent vis-a-vis the party leadership rather than jump ship. The paper tests this hypothesis by drawing on a dataset on legislators’ political and personal biographies in the Israeli legislature, the Knesset. The choice of the Israeli legislature allows for an investigation of these career dynamics in the context of relatively stable electoral system, combining a low threshold with a large district magnitude and a closed candidate list, coupled with a high degree of party system fragmentation.
