Voting in Lithuanian Parliament: Is There Anything More Than Position v Opposition?

Most of the literature on parliamentary voting concluded that the main dividing line in most of the parliaments around the world is that between the position and opposition. However, there is some evidence that the next most important dividing line in parliaments is based on ideological orientations of MPs (Hix, Noury 2008). Also, some evidence exists that parliamentary position is more homogeneous in voting than opposition (Uzupyte, Morkevicius, Krilavicius 2012). Our main aim in this presentation is to explore this latter finding further and to look more closely into which issues are dividing opposition parties besides being opposed to the voting of the ruling parties. For this task we selected the most important votes (1179 in total) from the 2008-2012 term of the Lithuanian parliament and divided them into 5 major themes: 1) economy, 2) culture and morality, 3) political system and law and order, 4) quality of life and 5) social policy and services. Then employing homogeneity analysis (Michailidis, de Leeuw 1998; de Leeuw, Mair 2009) we explore patterns of MPs voting paying special attention to possible ideological differences within different thematic fields and voting of opposition parties.