Abstract
There are concerns about the distinctiveness of opposition party behaviour in legislatures, but the literature offers mixed findings. This paper contributes to this debate by analysing government-opposition distinctiveness in four parliamentary democracies (Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, United Kingdom) over a long time span (1945-2020). The expectation of a long-term decline of government-opposition distinctiveness is related to increasing levels of party system fragmentation and minority governance, especially in countries with more proportional electoral systems. Decreasing patterns of distinctiveness are expected most clearly among parties with prior governing experience, while challenger parties are expected to behave more distinctively. The country selection offers a diverse set of countries in terms of electoral rules as well as the occurrence of minority governments. In each country, we analyse patterns of parliamentary voting behaviour, in particular opposition party support for government bills, as well as speech making, in particular opposition sentiment. The data collection is based on combining various existing sources of parliamentary data, appended by original data scraping and processing of parliamentary data sources. Our results show a diversity of trends in government-opposition distinctiveness in the four countries we analysed. Overall we find an increase in distinctiveness in terms of parliamentary voting behaviour, followed by a decrease in most countries. We do not find a similar pattern for speech-making, where particularly in the United Kingdom and Canada, we find an increasing divergence between the increasingly positive sentiment of governing party MPs and the increasingly negative sentiment of opposition parties.
