India and Israel are among the few contemporary democracies that adopted legislation to penalize elected members of parliament who violate the party whip and vote against and / or leave the parties that got them elected to the legislature. The immediate motivation for the passage of these laws was the same, i.e. the ensure that there would be sufficiently strong penalties in place to prevent potential indiscipline from leading to the fall of the incumbent government. Since their adoption, the anti-defection laws of the two countries have had very different trajectories of institutional development: the Israeli law has been changed on a number of occasions and almost always with the intention of making defections easier, while the Indian law was changed only once, in 2003, with the intention of eliminating mid-term defections for all intents and purposes. Furthermore, the effect of the anti-defection laws on the survival of governments and the penalty for legislators has also been quite different: while the Indian parliament has witnessed both the termination of governments due to defections as well as the disqualification of legislators for violating the party whip on confidence and confidences and no-confidence votes, no Israeli government has fallen on account of defections and only very few Member of Knesset have been sanctioned as defectors.
This paper seeks to analyze and understand these patterns of convergence and divergence across the two cases by answering the following questions:1. Why did the two parliaments decide to strengthen government stability by curbing the independence of their members? 2. Why did the two seemingly similar laws have led to different results with regard to both government termination and penalizing defecting legislators? 3. Why was the Indian legislation so much more stable than the Israeli anti-defection law?
