If you can beat them, confront them: Party-level analysis of opposition behavior in European national parliaments
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116517752870 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Author | Or Tuttnauer |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
If you can beat them,
confront them: Party-level
analysis of opposition
behavior in European
national parliaments
Or Tuttnauer
Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Israel
Abstract
This article explains the variation in opposition behavior by investigating parliamentary
voting of opposition parties across 16 European national parliaments. It finds that fea-
tures of an opposition party that increase its likelihood of winning office in future
elections—its size and experience in government—increase the party’s tendency
toward confrontation with the government, as do features that increase the party’s
need to differentiate itself from the government. At the systemic level, features that
increase the attractiveness of cooperation—such as an open structure of competition
and considerable influence of the opposition on parliamentary decision-making—
decrease tendencies toward confrontation. Together, party-specific and systemic
features explain two-thirds of the observed variation in the behavior of opposition
parties, even without controlling for vote-specific factors.
Keywords
Comparative politics, legislative studies, parliamentary opposition, political parties,
voting
Introduction
Parliamentary opposition is ‘very nearly the most distinctive characteristic of dem-
ocracy itself’ (Dahl, 1966: 14) and is acknowledged as a sine qua non for modern
democracy (Ionescu and de Madariaga, 1968). In recent years, a growing body of
European Union Politics
2018, Vol. 19(2) 278–298
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116517752870
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Corresponding author:
Or Tuttnauer, Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem
9190501, Israel.
Email: or.tuttnauer@mail.huji.ac.il
research has dealt directly with parliamentary opposition and its interaction with
the government in the parliamentary plenum (e.g. Andeweg et al., 2008; De Giorgi
and Moury, 2015; Louwerse et al., 2017; Loxbo and Sjo
¨lin, 2017; Steinack, 2011).
However, while it is well acknowledged that parliamentary opposition can rarely be
considered a unitary actor (Mu´ jica and Sa
´nchez-Cuenca, 2006; Norton, 2008), few
studies have addressed the composite nature of opposition by treating its constitu-
ent parties as the unit of analysis. Instead, most literature has the per-vote conflict
(or consensus) in parliament as its unit of analysis (e.g. Giuliani, 2008;
Hix and Noury, 2016; but cf. De Giorgi and Marangoni, 2015). Hence, variation
in the conflict-seeking behavior of opposition parties has remained largely unex-
plained. Moreover, over the last three decades scholars have repeatedly pointed to
the scarcity of comparative research on parliamentary opposition (Andeweg, 2013;
Blondel, 1997; Helms, 2008; Louwerse et al., 2017; Von Beyme, 1987), with a
few notable exceptions (Falco-Gimeno and Jurado, 2011; Maeda, 2015;
Williams, 2016). This study aims to add to the research of opposition by conducting
a quantitative, comparative investigation of the behavior of parties in parliamen-
tary opposition across 16 European Union (EU) member states, focusing on the
features of the individual opposition party that affect the extent to which it tends to
either confront the government on plenary votes or cooperate with it.
Variation in conflict-seeking tendencies across opposition parties in the same
parliament is not just a hypothetical possibility but a prevalent real-world phenom-
enon. Two examples may serve to elucidate this, one from the United Kingdom,
and the other from Finland. In 2007, two right-wing parties sat, facing a Labour
government, on the opposition benches in the British House of Commons. The two
shared a similar ideology, and their preferences similarly diverged from the left-
wing government. However, while the Conservatives opposed the government on
81% of roll-call votes held in parliament that year, the Democratic Unionist Party
opposed the government on only 56%, a 36-percentage point difference.
In Finland, throughout the Aho cabinets of 1991–1994, the left-wing Social
Democratic Party and the Green League shared the opposition benches as well
as a similar ideological placement on the right–left axis, but the former opposed the
government on more votes than the latter by a difference of eight percentage points.
These are just two examples of a wider phenomenon. In the 16 European national
parliaments analyzed below, considerable differences can be observed between the
most confrontational opposition party and the least so: as high as 78 percentage
points in the United Kingdom, 31 percentage points in Poland, 42 percentage
points in Estonia, and so on.
In this article, I explain the variation in conflict-seeking tendencies of opposition
parties by analyzing the voting behavior of 54 such parties from 16 EU member
states. I find evidence for the impact of nonpolicy considerations on their parlia-
mentary behavior; specifically, those features of a party that make it more likely to
win office or more in need of differentiation from the government at the next
elections, also increase its tendency to confront the government.
Tuttnauer 279
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