Still in Opposition Mode? Communist Parties Supporting Government in Italy and Portugal

Is it possible to lose the "opposition mode" after decades spent in the opposition benches? Extant research seems sceptical about it. Focusing on the performance of extreme right parties, the literature shows that their populist aspects allow them to succeed in the electoral arena as well as in opposition, but then usually turn into disadvantages once in government (Heinisch, 2003), although with some exceptions (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2005). Over the last decade, some scholarship (Olsen et al, 2010; Dunphy and Bale, 2011) has dealt with the consequences that radical left parties face as coalition members or government supporters. This paper aims at answering our initial question through the analysis of the behaviour of two far left parties - the Italian Refounded Communist party (RC) and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) - which decided to support a centre left government, respectively in 1996 and 2015. Despite the apparently huge time distance between these two political facts, we believe a comparison will be worthwhile given the number of common features that the two parties share. Both parties had been indeed excluded from power since the instauration of democracy in their respective countries - although RC was a successor of the historical Italian Communist Party (PCI), resulted from a split between the more reformist and the more radical party members -; both parties had consequently played the role of permanent opposition for decades, trying to exploit such a role by constantly keeping the government accountable and presenting themselves to the electorate as an intransigent opposition actor; and finally both parties had the chance to join the government as supporting parties. How did they adapt to this new role after so many years in opposition? We will try to answer this question through the analysis of both the voting behaviour and the oversight activity of the two parties in the two years before and after the government's change. What, if anything, has changed? And in which direction? We test two main research hypotheses. First, we assume that the decision to support the government follows a process of approach in the parliamentary arena between communist parties and its centre-left counterparts. Second, we expect communist parties to relax their oversight activity once they start supporting the government.