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Government–Opposition Relations and the Vote of No-Confidence
Abstract
The vote of no-confidence is the primary mechanism through which the principle of government accountability to the legislature – the defining feature of parliamentary democracy – is achieved. Yet, no research has been devoted to its influence on the relations between the government and the mechanism’s main users – the opposition. This article attempts to fill this lacuna by theorising how restrictiveness in the vote of no-confidence influences the opposition’s strategies vis-à-vis the government in legislative voting. We delineate the influence of the vote of no-confidence on the opposition via its preference to pursue more cooperative strategies, as opposed to conflictual ones, distinguishing between the two stages of the vote of no-confidence – initiating and voting. We empirically explore the relation between the vote of no-confidence and the voting behaviour of 59 opposition parties in 16 countries, showing that greater restrictions on both stages of the vote of no-confidence correlate with less conflictual opposition behaviour.
... Israel has a weak parliament that is dominated by the executive branch (Cohen 2024;Tuttnauer and Hazan 2023). The judiciary is independent and strong, and it plays an important role in balancing the weak parliament and the strong executive branch (Roznai 2024;Zamir 2021). ...
... For example, in 2014, the government amended "Basic Law: Government (Vote of No-Confidence)" from semi-constructive to become fully constructive. Scholars indicated that a full constructive vote of no-confidence is rare in democracies, and it constrains the power of the opposition to oversee the government (Tuttnauer and Hazan 2023). ...
... A government aware of the limited potential of being overthrown can function with relative confidence, not inordinately subject to intimidation by the opposition. On the other hand, the opposition, aware that its chances of toppling the government are low, might have to resort to alternative means of supervision and control (Tuttnauer & Hazan, 2019). At the same time, the cvnc may have implications on the relationship within the executive branch, as the mechanism reduces the bargaining power of the parties that make up the coalition. ...
A constructive vote of no-confidence is more restrictive than a regular vote of no-confidence as it limits the ability of the legislative branch to challenge the government. Belgium and Israel are the only two countries to adopt the constructive vote of no-confidence while being established democracies. This paper focuses on these two highly interesting cases and asks two questions: 1) What were the circumstances and intentions that brought about the adoption of the cvnc in Belgium and in Israel? 2) What were the implications of the adoption of the cvnc on the Belgian and the Israeli political systems? The findings suggest that both Belgium and Israel adopted the cvnc out of a desire to stabilize their governments; however only Belgium has experienced a clear improvement in government stability after its adoption. In Israel the findings are mixed, depending on the measurement used to define government turnover.
Objective: The mechanism for dismissing the President and/or Vice President in Indonesia is regulated by the 1945 Constitution. This process is initiated by the House of Representatives submitting a proposal to the People's Consultative Assembly, stipulating that the President and/or Vice President has violated the provisions in Articles 7A and 7B, and this must be proven first by the Constitutional Court through examination and proof. If it is proven that the President and/or Vice President has violated these provisions, the results of the Constitutional Court trial will be submitted to the People's Consultative Assembly. Subsequently, the People's Consultative Assembly is obliged to hold a trial to decide whether the President and/or Vice President will be impeached. Article 7A of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia regulates the impeachment of the president and the provisions related to the presidential office in Indonesia. Method: According Mahmud Marzuki, this normative legal research, as it is defined entails the process of finding, comprehending and solving legal problems embracing the practice rather its theory. This work in particular focuses on the way in which the House of Representatives can investigate and possibly remove the President and Vice President from their offices. Result: Some of the author's findings related to the essence of impeachment in the Indonesian constitution are, first, to maintain a system of checks and balances in the presidential office through oversight. Second, the direction of the presidential impeachment regulations needs to be improved by clarifying the reasons and mechanisms for impeachment, aiming to avoid dismissing the president for political rather than legal reasons. Novelty: The present study also analyzes the Indonesian Constitution of 1945 about presidential removal from office, stressing the weak legal rationale as well as the appropriate procedure to remove a president to avoid the potential manipulation for political gains. This calls for regulatory improvement to improve checks and balances in order to prop up a better legal framework of fair and constitutional presidential accountability.
Committees’ use of their right to initiate parliament decisions have notably evolved under Sweden’s unicameral parliament. Since 2011, initiatives have increasingly served as a political instrument tactically employed by opposition parties against the will of government parties. Since the fall of 2020, this trend has risen radically, indicating that this constitutional tool is gradually being used in conflict with its original purpose. Increase in conflict levels and fragmentation within political landscape (from five to eight parliamentary parties) correspond with this escalated utilisation of committees’ initiative powers. These developments raise doubts about political parties’ ability to adhere to the lawmaker’s presuppositions that committee initiatives should be used with caution and in the pursuit of unity. Our data lends some support to earlier research’s view of committee initiatives as potential expressions of inter-party conflict, but it also highlights the need for further qualitative studies into parties’ motives for employing this parliamentary instrument.
The article investigates roll‐call request and its effects on opposition‐voting behavior. It argues that parties use roll‐call votes (RCVs) as a position‐taking instrument to boost public attention for issues they care about. This argument implies that RCVs are requested strategically but opposition behavior should not differ systematically between recorded and nonrecorded votes. Studying all voting activities of the 19th German Bundestag (2017–21), the analysis shows that RCVs are more likely on high‐salience issues, more important motion types, and to some extent opposition motions. Voting conforms to the position‐taking model as opposition parties are less likely to vote with the government on their own motions and more important motion types. However, opposition behavior does not differ systematically between recorded and nonrecorded votes suggesting that parties act consistently across all votes. Thus, RCVs provide valid measures for studying interparty competition in parliament despite their selective sampling properties.
Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government’s outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activity as a signaling tool of their attitude toward the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and individual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data of 27,371 respondents. The findings provide support for the existence of both mechanisms. Parliamentary conflict on legislative votes has a general positive effect on opposition parties’ electoral performance, conditional on systemic and party-specific factors.
The core feature of a parliamentary system is not that governments tend to emerge from the legislatures in some way or another, but their political responsibility to this body. While in only some parliamentary systems the government needs formal support of parliament in order to take office, in all parliamentary systems no government can survive against the will of parliament. The academic literature related to the rules for how governments form is vast. Strikingly, scholars have paid far less attention to unpacking the core institution of parliamentary systems of government – the confidence relationship and the various no confidence procedures. Placing the focus on how the parliament can hold the government accountable, this special issue assesses the larger influences legislative confidence has on executive–legislative relations, and improves our understanding of the ways in which the executive may be challenged or dismissed.
Governments in countries with the constructive vote of no-confidence (CVNC) tend to be more durable than governments in countries with a regular vote of no-confidence (RVNC). Although this is the common claim in the limited literature that exists about the CVNC, no comprehensive study and no empirical tests have been conducted to date. We begin to fill this lacuna. Using a two-stage analysis including a Multivariate Cox proportional Hazard Model, we find that the type of no-confidence vote affects the government’s term of office, so that in countries with a CVNC, governments in general, and post-election governments in particular, last longer in office than governments in RVNC countries.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents an exceptional crisis situation not only for governments, but also for politicians in opposition. This article analyses opposition party expressed sentiment vis-à-vis government actions and policies during the first six months of 2020. Based on an original content analysis of parliamentary debates in four established parliamentary democracies (Germany, Israel, Netherlands, United Kingdom), relatively positive opposition expressed sentiment in parliament early on during the crisis is observed, in line with a ‘rally effect’ observed in public opinion. Sentiment turned more negative as the first wave of the crisis abated. Larger opposition parties with considerable prior government experience were more positive than larger parties without such experience.
This paper analyses the institutions associated with government termination in parliamentary systems: no-confidence and confidence motions, and the early dissolution of the parliament. We consider constitutional texts for all European countries between 1800 and 2019 and identify two broad trends: (1) the constitutionalisation of practices that have first emerged as the result of strategic interactions between the government and the parliament; (2) the tendency towards protecting both the executive and the parliament from mutual interference. While the first tendency has culminated with an almost universal constitutionalisation of the principle of parliamentarism in European constitutions, the second led to the protection of executives and the extension of effective legislative terms. We suggest that these constitutional developments are associated with the stabilisation of parliamentarism after World War II and conclude that although parliamentarism remains a flexible system, contemporary regimes do not function like their forebears did in the 19th century.
The organisation of legislative chambers and the consequences of parliamentary procedures have been among the most prominent research questions in legislative studies. Even though democratic elections not only lead to the formation of a government but also result in an opposition, the literature has mostly neglected oppositions and their role in legislative chambers. This paper proposes to fill this gap by looking at the legislative organisation from the perspective of opposition players. The paper focuses on the potential influence of opposition players in the policy-making process and presents data on more than 50 legislative chambers. The paper shows considerable variance of the formal power granted to opposition players. Furthermore, the degree of institutionalisation of opposition rights is connected to electoral systems and not necessarily correlated with other institutional characteristics such as regime type or the size of legislative chambers.
This article analyses how populist parties wage opposition in parliament. We conceptualise opposition behaviour in terms of two independent dimensions: scrutiny (monitoring and criticising government actions) and policy-making (participating in or directly influencing legislative production). In line with the conceptualisation of populism as an opposition to the ruling elite in name of ‘the people’, our hypothesis is that populist opposition parties are more likely to use scrutiny and less likely to use policy-making tools than non-populist opposition parties. We study the Netherlands between 1998 and 2017 as a typical example of a consensus democracy, where populist parties have a greater opportunity to win representation and use parliamentary tools (compared to majoritarian democracies). Our findings indicate that populist opposition parties are particularly less likely to engage in policy-making behaviour and somewhat more likely to engage in scrutiny behaviour.
A political system cannot be imagined without opposition. Despite this crucial position in politics, political science has largely neglected to study oppositions. Attempting to fill this gap, this article analyses the institutional opportunities of parliamentary oppositions. It offers a parsimonious framework by distinguishing two dimensions of opposition influence: some institutions enable oppositions to control governments, while others offer opportunities to present alternatives. A comparison of oppositions’ opportunities in 21 democracies shows that countries fall into four groups along these dimensions: in majoritarian democracies, weak control mechanisms are countered by excellent opportunities to publicise alternatives. Consociational democracies are characterised by strong control mechanisms, but provide only weak opportunities to present alternatives. Moreover, in Southern Europe, control mechanisms and opportunities to present alternatives are weak, while both are pronounced in Nordic Europe. The results are summarised in three indices that can easily be applied in future research examining oppositions and their power.
In parliamentary systems, parties compete for votes and offices in the electoral arena, but in many, systems they also cooperate in the legislative arena. This article examines the question of how the government status of parties affects their legislative behaviour. We develop a simple spatial model that includes parties' positional goals (vote, office, etc.) to formalize the notion of accommodating legislative behaviour. The model implies that government parties are most accommodating while opposition parties are least accommodating. The hypothesis is evaluated by comparing two pairs of similar political systems: Danish and Finnish coalition governments, as well as German and Australian bicameralism. The case studies support the main hypothesis that government status systematically affects parties' level of accommodation. We discuss the implications for two seminal approaches in comparative institutional analysis advanced by Lijphart (1999b) and Tsebelis (2002).
Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason.
Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the
institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional
hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition
quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models
is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political
world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented
in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.
Whether the opposition in a democratic country is unified or fragmented is an important characteristic that may influence the accountability of government, as a recent study demonstrates that the degree of opposition fragmentation has consequences for the electoral performance of ruling parties. This study explores the determinants of opposition
fragmentation using data from 18 advanced democracies. I argue and provide evidence that deliberative parliamentary rules that allow opposition parties to have greater influence in the policymaking process lead to higher levels of opposition fragmentation. Opposition parties deprived of political influence tend to reduce their levels of fragmentation
in order to become more competitive. This finding suggests that there may be a trade-off between deliberativeness and competitiveness in democratic politics.
Cohesive government-vs-opposition voting is a robust empirical regularity in West-minster democracies. Using new data from the modern Scottish parliament we show that this pattern cannot be explained by similarity of preferences within or between the government and opposition ranks. We look at differences in the way that parties operate in Westminster and Holyrood and use roll call records show that the ob-served behavior is unlikely to be determined by preferences on any underlying issue dimension. Using a simple variant of the agenda-setting model—in which MPs can commit to their voting strategies—we show that the procedural rules for reaching collective decisions in Westminster systems can explain this phenomenon: in the equilibrium, on some bills, members of the opposition vote against the government irrespective of the proposal that is made. Such strategic opposition can reinforce government cohesiveness and have a moderating effect on policy outcomes. We in-troduce new data from the House of Lords, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Irish Assembly to distinguish our claims from competing accounts of the data.
The existence of a political executive is a key feature of any political system: from eminently democratic regimes to totalitarian dictatorships, and every shade in between. In recent decades the long-term trend of putting constitutional and democratic constraints on the political executive is reversed. In addition to an autocratic turn in some countries, internationalization, securitization and a growing need for coordination shift the balance between governments and other political institutions. This re-empowerment of the political executive has contributed to its rediscovery in political science. As the 37 chapters in this volume demonstrate, the past two decades have seen an impressive outpouring of research on political executives. Edited and written by 49 of the most distinguished scholars in the field, this Oxford Handbook of Political Executives combines substantive stocktaking with setting new agendas for the next generation of political executive research. The book is organized around five themes. Part I, Theorizing and Researching Political Executives is devoted to the theoretical and methodological approaches in the study of political executives. Part II looks at The Composition and Life Cycle of Political Executives, from the formation to the termination of successive governments. Part III discusses The Dynamics and Developments within the Executive, such as hierarchical relations and internal political processes. Part IV focusses on The Dynamics and Developments between the Executive and the Broader Political Context, including interactions with the bureaucracy and parliament. Part V is devoted to Political Executives Beyond the Democratic Nation State, such as the European Union and autocratic regimes.
Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe provides a comprehensive analysis of coalition politics in Western Europe over the post-1945 period. It champions a dynamic approach using bargaining and transaction cost theory to understand the ‘life cycle ‘ of parliamentary politics. After a review of the literature the theory chapter addresses the roles of bargaining and transaction costs in coalition governance. Eight comparative chapters address the topics of government formation, cabinet membership, coalition agreements, portfolio allocation, conflict management, cabinet termination and duration, and the electoral consequences of coalition politics. The book is based on the most comprehensive data set ever employed in coalition studies, which includes both coalitional and single-party countries and governments. Each chapter provides a comparative overview of its topic and state-of-the art statistical analysis. Conceptually and empirically the study argues for an integrated approach to coalition politics, stressing six clusters of explanatory factors: country-specific and temporal circumstances, ‘structural attributes ‘, actors ‘ preferences, institutions, the bargaining environment, and ‘critical events ‘. While the importance of different causal factors varies between the various phases of the parliamentary life cycle, no facet of coalition politics can be understood without reference to several of these factors. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester and Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Most analyses dealing with the interaction of parties in parliament assume their interests to be fixed between elections. However, a rational perspective suggests that parties adapt their behaviour throughout the legislative term. I argue that this change is influenced by incentives and possibilities to shape legislation and the need to distinguish oneself from competitors. While for government parties it matters whether they have to share offices, for opposition parties the influence on policy-making is important. By examining the sentiment of all parliamentary speeches on bill proposals from six established democracies over more than twenty years, I analyse institutional and contextual effects. The results show that single-party governments tend to become more positive towards the end of the legislative cycle compared to coalition governments. On the other hand, opposition parties under minority governments, or with more institutionalised influence on government bills, show a more negative trend in comparison to their counterparts.
The core feature of parliamentary democracy is government responsibility to the legislature. The most important instrument by which parliament can express its lack of support for the government is the vote of no confidence. This mechanism remains significantly under-studied, and research on votes of no confidence calls out for systematic attention. It is also timely because parliamentary democracies are making it procedurally harder for parliament to terminate the government. Through developing and conceptualising a series of indicators that affect the relative ease with which parliament can challenge and terminate government, this study proposes the first ever framework for analysing votes of no confidence. It then empirically locates countries in the framework and discusses those that have shifted over time. The goal of this study is to begin to fill an academic lacuna concerning, arguably, the defining feature of parliamentary democracy.
This article argues that opposition veto power in institutional arenas such as second chambers can foster a more consensual relationship between government and opposition parties in parliament. This theoretical claim is supported in the article using data on legislative voting behaviour in the German Bundestag. The statistical analysis shows that opposition and government parties are much more likely to vote the same way, if the opposition controls a majority in the second chamber and this chamber enjoys veto power. This pattern holds even when controlling for policy-area specific ideological distances between government and opposition parties and electoral signalling incentives. The article’s findings suggest that government and opposition parties seek compromises early in the legislative process and that bicameral conflicts are often already resolved in the lower chamber. The results here support theoretical arguments on the absorption of institutional veto players and challenge the frequent claim that opposition veto power leads to more competitive behaviour and gridlock.
Social scientists use the concept of interactions to study effect dependency. In the causal inference literature, interaction terms may be used in two distinct type of analysis. The first type of analysis focuses on causal interactions, where the analyst is interested in whether two treatments have differing effects when both are administered. The second type of analysis focuses on effect modification, where the analyst investigates whether the effect of a single treatment varies across levels of a baseline covariate. While both forms of interaction analysis are typically conducted using the same type of statistical model, the identification assumptions for these two types of analysis are very different. In this paper, we clarify the difference between these two types of interaction analysis. We demonstrate that this distinction is mostly ignored in the political science literature. We conclude with a review of several applications where we show that the form of the interaction is critical to proper interpretation of empirical results.
This article explains the variation in opposition behavior by investigating parliamentary voting of opposition parties across 16 European national parliaments. It finds that features 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.
In 2000, there was a conference on Building the Constitution. It focused on the constitution in the external world, constitutional development and form, the place of the Treaty of Waitangi, multiculturalism, the head of state, the cabinet, public service and subnational government, parliamentary reform, the roles of judges, and the pros and cons of having a written constitution. I analyse the debates and identify notable areas of agreement: constitutionalism must be respected; settling the Treaty’s constitutional status is essential; parliamentary government would continue; international and social dimensions are significant; republicanism is inevitable; the evolutionary and pragmatic tradition would prevail, as would constitutional codification; and democratic and appropriate change processes must be employed. However, I argue, apart from aspects of the Electoral Act 1993, there has been no agreement on how to change the constitution and who should be involved. This was illustrated by the constitutional events and statutes between 2000 and 2010, especially the passage of the Supreme Court Act 2003. New Zealanders must debate the legitimate, democratic means of constitutional change as well as the substantive issues.
Parliamentary democracy is the most common way of organizing delegation and accountability in contemporary democracies. Yet knowledge of this type of regime has been incomplete and often unsystematic. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies offers new conceptual clarity on the topic. Taking principal-agent theory as its framework, the work illustrates how a variety of apparently unrelated representation issues can now be understood. This procedure allows scholarship to move well beyond what have previously been cloudy and confusing debates aimed at defining the virtues and perils of parliamentarism. This new empirical investigation includes all 17 West European parliamentary democracies. These countries are compared in a series of cross-national tables and figures, and 17 country chapters provide a wealth of information on four discrete stages in the delegation process: delegation from voters to parliamentary representatives, delegation from parliament to the prime minister and cabinet, delegation within the cabinet, and delegation from cabinet ministers to civil servants. Each chapter illustrates how political parties serve as bonding instruments, which align incentives and permit citizen control of the policy process. This is complemented by a consideration of external constraints, such as courts, central banks, corporatism, and the European Union, which can impinge on national-level democratic delegation. The concluding chapters go on to consider how well the problems of delegation and accountability are solved in these countries. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies provides an unprecedented guide to contemporary European parliamentary democracies. As democratic governance is transformed at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it illustrates the important challenges faced by the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe.
The divide between government and opposition is clearly visible in the way members of parliament vote, but the variation in government–opposition voting has been left relatively unexplored. This is particularly the case for contextual variation in the extent to which parliamentary voting behaviour follows the government–opposition divide. This article attempts to explain levels of government–opposition voting by looking at three factors: first, the majority status of cabinets (differentiating between majority and minority cabinets), cabinet ideology (differentiating between more centrist and more extremist cabinets) and norms about cabinet formation (differentiating between wholesale and partial alternation in government). The study includes variation at the level of the country, the government and the vote. The article examines voting in the Netherlands (with a history of partial alternation) and Sweden (with a history of wholesale alternation). We find strong support for the effect of cabinet majority status, cabinet ideology and norms about cabinet formation on government–opposition voting.
The existence and activity of Political Opposition is indispensable in democratic systems of government. This chapter argues that the vital democratic functions of opposition (informing the voters and providing an alternative) are confined to the electoral arena. In the parliamentary arena, however, the distinction between government and opposition is blurred when opposition parties support the government, when governing parties oppose the government, when opposition parties provide structural support to a minority government, and when the government anticipates an opposition majority in another institution of government. As long as this blurring of opposition in the parliamentary arena goes unnoticed by the voters, opposition parties may still fulfill their democratic duties in the electoral arena, albeit in a hypocritical way. However, in recent years, government and opposition are growing so indistinct in the parliamentary arena that increasingly voters may find that they are no longer offered a meaningful choice within the system. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013. All rights are reserved.
The paper looks at the relationship between institutions and vote unity in national parliaments with the help of a large data set of votes from 33 national parliaments. The tests run are the first to confirm empirically the relationship between vote of confidence procedure and vote unity. The paper also provides a theoretical explanation for why the existence of the confidence procedure influences vote unity despite being used only rarely. The vote of confidence influences votes through the development of control mechanisms as well as the selection of party members who are more ideologically united. This study also challenges the view that electoral rules which make candidates individually accountable to voters necessarily lead to more vote defections. The findings suggest that higher personal accountability decreases vote unity only if party leaders do not control candidate nomination. Parties that rely on government finance for campaigns are also more united.
The power to remove the government via no-confidence motion is a powerful tool afforded to the opposition. By triggering the government’s downfall, opposition parties can substantially influence policy direction in parliamentary democracies. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how government and opposition parties interact to determine the occurrence of no-confidence motions and their chance of success. In this project, I develop a simple formal model that identifies the factors influencing when opposition parties propose no-confidence motions and their outcomes. I find support for these expectations by estimating an empirical model that is explicitly derived from the underlying theoretical model. Unlike previous empirical studies of government stability, this project honors the strategic interactions that occur between government and opposition parties. In addition to the possibility of the motion passing, opposition parties are motivated by electoral considerations, which induce different behaviors at various stages of the electoral cycle. This project offers a number of implications for the study of parliamentary politics, including theories of opposition behavior, democratic accountability, and government duration and termination.
Previous research has proved that a high level of consensus in the law-making process can be found in the European parliamentary democracies. This consensual pattern of behaviour cannot be explained by the systemic factors traditionally believed to account for the variation in the opposition among countries. The Italian case demonstrates that none of the noteworthy changes that occurred in the political system over the last 20 years have affected the amount of consensus between government and opposition. The aim of the present article is to explore which factors might influence the (more or less) consensual conduct of the Italian parliamentary opposition in the law-making process and, in doing so, to contribute to the progress of research in this field.
The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed a surprising reversal of the long-observed trend towards the disappearance of second chambers in unitary states, with 28 countries – all but one of them unitary – adopting the bicameral system. This article explores this development by first setting it in the context of the historical evolution of second chambers and the arguments that support bicameralism, and then exploring the characteristics that distinguish today's second chambers from first chambers. A ‘census’ of second chambers in 2014 is used to provide data on second chambers in federal and unitary states, to facilitate comparison with earlier data, and to distinguish between ‘new’ and longer-established second chambers. The article concludes that newly established second chambers are concentrated predominantly in political systems where liberal democratic principles are not established, suggesting that the debate over their role in democratic states is set to continue.
Reviews the patterns of delegation and accountability in 17 Western European parliamentary democracies, over the post-war period. It provides information about the links between voters and MPs, between MPs and the cabinet, within the cabinet, and between ministers and civil servants, discussing potentials for agency loss. It places political parties in the delegation relations and provides a comparative account of Constitution amendments and law making in these states. It concludes by identifying the most common parliamentary delegation mechanisms in Western Europe as well as major empirical exceptions, and the main trends of the 1945-2000 period.
If no-confidence motions are primarily motivated by bringing down governments, why do only approximately 5% of no-confidence motions in advanced parliamentary democracies from 1960 result in the termination of government? In this project the author addresses this puzzle by developing a formal model of the electoral benefits of no-confidence motions and tests these hypotheses with the use of an original data set. No-confidence motions represent highly visible opportunities for opposition parties to highlight their strength or ability compared to the government in the hopes of improving their vote shares. The author finds support for the signal-based theory on a sample of 20 advanced parliamentary democracies from 1960 to 2008. Although no-confidence motions result in decreases for the government parties, the opposition parties that propose the motion experience boosts in vote share. This relationship is even stronger when the proposing party is an alternative governing possibility—illustrated by the conditioning impacts of the number of parliamentary parties and the opposition party’s ideological extremism. This provides an explanation as to why opposition parties would continue to challenge the government even though the motions are likely to fail.
Abstract We use roll-call votes to examine the number,and content of the main dimensions of the policy space in several democratic parliaments.We look at fourteen parliaments, which include several cases of two main institutional designs: presidential or parliamentarysystems; and single-party or coalition government,systems. We apply a standard geometric scaling metric (NOMINATE) to estimate the ‘revealed location’ of parties and parliamentarians. We add a regression analysis, using exogenous measures of party positions. We find two dominant dimensions in most parliaments: the first dimension tends to be a government- opposition conflict; whereas the second dimension tends to be an ideological (left-right) dimension. Nevertheless, due to the way agenda-setting works in different institutional
I present a formal model of the confidence vote procedure, an institutional arrangement that permits a prime minister to attach the fate of a particular policy to a vote on government survival. The analysis indicates that confidence vote procedures make it possible for prime ministers to exercise significant control over the nature of policy outcomes, even when these procedures are not actually invoked. Neither cabinet ministers, through their authority over specific portfolios, nor members of parliament, through the use of no-confidence motions, can counteract the prime minister's policy control on the floor of parliament. The analysis also illuminates the circumstances under which prime ministers should invoke confidence vote procedures, focusing attention on the position-taking incentives of the parties that support the government, rather than on the level of policy conflict between the government and parliament.
Series editors' preface Acknowledgements Part I. The Context: 1. Theory, institutions, and government formation 2. The social context of government formation 3. The government formation process Part II. The Model: 4. Government equilibrium 5. Strong parties Part III. Empirical Investigations: 6. Two cases: Germany, 1987 Ireland, 1992-3 7. Theoretical implications, data, and operationalization 8. Exploring the model: a comparative perspective 9. A multivariate investigation of portfolio allocation Part IV. Applications, Extensions, and Conclusions: 10. Party systems and cabinet stability 11. Making the model more realistic 12. Party politics and administrative reform 13. Governments and parliaments Bibliography.
Most research on parliamentary opposition focuses on constitutional and institutional aspects. This article argues that these approaches are limited in explaining differences between opposition parties. A case study of the Bavarian State Parliament supports the assumption that complex patterns of a number of factors, such as individual party groups’ ideology and history, their members’ socio-demographic background, and their informal rules of engagement, influence the way opposition parties behave. The study shows distinctive differences between the appearance and the strategies employed to influence the majority's decision-making. The Social Democrats, a traditional mass party with over 40 years in opposition, focused on a strategy of professional, subject-oriented cooperation within parliament. The Greens chose confrontational power policies that had their main effect outside parliament. This stands in line with the party's origin in grassroots movements and its culture of conflict resolution. The particular way of how party identities and policies coincide with the preference of one opposition strategy over another indicates that historic and socio-cultural factors are highly relevant for parliamentary behaviour.
There can be no real democracy without opposition. In representative democracies, the parliamentary opposition holds a special place, if not always in empirical terms, certainly when looked at from a normative perspective. Its relevance has been eclipsed by more recent paradigmatic shifts in the field of comparative politics. However, a careful revisiting of the arguments put forward suggests that the notable neglect of ‘opposition issues’ is not justified by any compelling theoretical or empirical contentions. Whereas it remains extremely difficult to develop more sophisticated theoretical propositions regarding the parliamentary opposition, the subjects' striking resistance to theory may be considered a symbol of democracy's vibrancy itself, and it is comparative research that can offer the most fascinating insights into the world of parliamentary oppositions.
ALTHOUGH THE CLASSICAL WORK ON POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN Western Democracies , edited by Robert Dahl, was published decades ago, in 1966, the analysis of the characteristics of opposition, in democracies or elsewhere, has advanced rather less than other aspects of comparative politics. The word ‘opposition’ is used daily to account for a variety of developments; but its many meanings have not been systematically related to the differences among the political systems of the world. A number of comparative studies did appear after the 1966 seminal work, admittedly, including one by Dahl himself in 1973, as well as those by Ionescu and Madariaga in 1968, by Schapiro in 1972, by Tokes in 1979, by Kolinsky in 1988 and by Rodan in 1996; these volumes explore aspects of the concept which could not have been even referred to in the original study, since that study was confined to Western democracies and to the part played by political parties in the context of opposition. Yet the problem has still not been tackled truly comprehensively, as, with the exception of the 1973 Dahl volume, the works on the subject are comparative only in the sense that they deal with more than one country; but their scope remains limited to a region or to a particular type of political system. Meanwhile, many country analyses examine the nature of political opposition in each particular case, but the information which they provide has to be brought within a common framework before we can hope to obtain a general picture of the characteristics of opposition across the world.
Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real-life politics? To answer this question, this article discusses different arguments that link institutional and policy-related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co-sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, it relates policy-, office- and vote-related incentives, as well as institutional and resource constraints of legislative actors, to the likelihood that these actors will take the lead in legislative agenda-setting. These arguments are confronted with original data on the universe of all legislative bills in four parliamentary systems over one and a half decades. The article concludes that opposition and, in particular, bipartisan agenda-setting is indeed rare. Yet, in contrast to widely held maxims, it is neither absent nor spurious, but related to the allocation of power and the intensity of ideological conflict both within and between the (coalition) government and parliament.
It is well known that in developed democracies the opposition tends to cooperate with the government. Spain is no exception: around 70 per cent of all ‘organic laws’ (constitutionally significant bills that require a parliamentary majority to be passed) are approved with the support of the main opposition party. We try to explain the variation in the level of consensus in the first seven legislative terms of the current Spanish democracy. We show that there are three key variables: the balance of power between government and opposition, the nature of the institutional actor that first proposes the bill, and the ideological significance of the bill.
Inspired by the agenda-setting literature, this article outlines a model of issue competition focusing on the interaction between government and opposition parties through the party-system agenda. Unlike previous studies of issue competition, the model makes it possible to answer questions such as why some parties have greater success than others in forcing other parties to address unpleasant issues. One of the central implications of the model is that opposition parties are freer to focus continually on issues that are advantageous to themselves, whereas government parties more often are forced to respond to issues brought up on the party-system agenda. Using data on issue competition in Denmark covering 25 years and 23 issue categories, the issue competition model is evaluated and finds strong support in a set of cross-sectional time-series analyses.
POPaD Dataset, 1st edn (Datafile and Codebook)
- E De Giorgi
- A L Dias
Parliaments and Governments Database (ParlGov) (Information on parties, elections and cabinets in modern democracies, Development version
- H Döring
- P Manow