Between conflict and consensus: Explaining opposition parties’ voting behaviour in parliament
Abstract
For voters to have a meaningful choice at elections, opposition parties should behave distinctively different from governing parties in parliament. This paper examines the factors that determine whether opposition parties vote for or against the government in parliament. The existing literature focuses on explanations at the party level and has included mostly single-country studies. Additionally, previous studies rarely analysed opposition parties’ behaviour beyond one or two parliamentary terms, reducing the variation in government characteristics (e.g. majority status). How the topic of the legislation at hand affects the voting behaviour of opposition parties has also remained relatively unexplored. Consequently, we still lack sufficient systematically empirically tested explanations of opposition behaviour across countries, governments, parties, and bills. Various explanations are brought together in a single framework, proposing that opposition parties are motivated by policy preferences (policy distance, populist ideology, opposition veto power), office aspirations (credibility of replacing the government, issue divisiveness within coalition), and electoral incentives (electoral vulnerability, issue saliency). The explanations are tested using data on parliamentary votes in four theoretically motivated cases of established parliamentary democracies (Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, United Kingdom) over a time frame of 75 years, ensuring sufficient within-country variation.
