Opposition Parties in European Legislatures under Pressure

Abstract

The aim of this panel is to investigate the behaviour of the opposition parties in European legislatures in recent years. With the emergence of new parties and the development of a new European context (both in economic and political respect) also the opposition parties’ behaviour has been transformed. Accordingly, we intend to broaden the classical approaches on parliamentary opposition along these dimensions: one is related to the transformation of the party context; the other one concerns the economic crisis and its political consequences. Our main research questions are the following: has the government-opposition relationship been transformed since the beginning of the economic crisis? Are partisan differences more or less pronounced under these new conditions? How have the radical parties reacted to the new circumstances in terms of parliamentary behaviour? The panel has both interpretative and theoretical purposes. On the one hand, we will seek to understand the extent to which the transformations occurring at both national and supranational level are changing the role and concrete behaviour of the opposition actors. On the other hand, as the study of opposition falls into the broader issue of how democracy works, light will also be shed on how representative democracy has evolved over the last decades by analysing the opposition’s behaviour and the government-opposition relationship. Senior and junior scholars are invited to submit theoretical and empirical papers adopting either a case study approach or a comparative perspective, as a rich variety of cases will certainly help us broaden our knowledge in this very relevant field.

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