A purpose of the present invention is to provide a diversity receiver and a diversity receiving method, which are capable of performing a diversity reception without depending upon a moving speed, and also capable of achieving compatibility between reception performance and current consumption. A bit error rate calculator (107) calculates a bit error rate from a demodulation result of a demodulator (106); a switching frequency calculator (108) calculates a switching frequency which corresponds to such a frequency for alternately switching initiating and stopping operations of the diversity reception in response to the bit error rate calculated by the bit error rate calculator (107); and a switching controller (105) performs a switching operation for selecting both two receivers (103, 104), and another switching operation for selecting any one of the two receivers (103, 104) in accordance with the switching frequency calculated by the switching frequency calculator (108) so as to synthesize respective output signals with each other to output a synthesized signal in a case where two sets of the receivers (103, 104) are selected.