In this paper, we propose the bootstrap and aggregating (bagging) vector quantization (VQ) classifier to improve the performance of the text-independent speaker recognition system. This method generates multiple training data sets by resampling the original training data set, constructs the corresponding VQ classifiers, and then integrates the multiple VQ classifiers into a single classifier by voting. The bagging method has been proven to greatly improve the performance of unstable classifiers. Through two different experiments, this paper shows that the VQ classifier is unstable. In one of these experiments, the bias and variance of a VQ classifier are computed with a waveform database. The variance of the VQ classifier is compared with that of the classification and regression tree (CART) classifier[1]. The variance of the VQ classifier is shown to be as large as that of the CART classifier. The other experiment involves speaker recognition. The speaker recognition rates vary significantly by the minor changes in the training data set. The speaker recognition experiments involving a closed set, text-independent and speaker identification are performed with the TIMIT database to compare the performance of the bagging VQ classifier with that of the conventional VQ classifier. The bagging VQ classifier yields improved performance over the conventional VQ classifier. It also outperforms the conventional VQ classifier in small training data set problems.