Voting Strategies of Opposition Parties Under Minority Government ꟷ A Review of the Salience Theory

Which voting strategies applies to opposition parties under minority government in Sweden? Müller and Strøm (1999) stated that parties in parliament do have different goals (votes, policy, office). The literature (Dahl 1966; Garritzmann 2017) also shows that goals of opposition parties (critique, control, and alternative, also known as ‘Trinity of Opposition’) differ from government goals and therefore voting strategies should differ. Minority governments make it especially hard for opposition parties to reach the goals of the ‘Trinity of Opposition’ when one considers the overall goal of maintaining government stability and the accompanied need of being open for negotiation with the government. This raises the question what voting strategies opposition parties apply in legislation? Previous studies have shed light on the salience theory (Klingemann et al. 1994) focusing on how parties in parliament reach their goals (Bäck et al. 2011; Klüver & Zubek 2015). Drawn from salience theory one would expect that policy fields which parties consider to be more important generate a more confrontational voting behavior between government and opposition parties. Measuring the salience of a policy field with data from the Comparative Manifestos Project and working with a multilevel linear regression model, including more than 20 000 bills dealt with in the Swedish parliament under six minority governments (1991-2018), I come to the result that the salience of a policy field has a significant negative effect on the percentage of shared votes between opposition parties and government. The more a policy field is considered to be important by parties in parliament the less do opposition parties vote in line with the government. Moreover, the analysis shows that the difference in the salience of a policy field between opposition parties and the biggest government party has a significant positive effect on the percentage of shared votes between opposition parties and government. Opposition parties and the government tend to vote in line with one other if any of the two considers a policy field to be important whereas the other considers it not to be. On the contrary, if the two consider a policy field to be important and therefore do not differ in saliency, the more confrontational is the voting behavior. This lets us assume that under minority government opposition parties get policy influence on issues that opposition parties consider to be important while the government does not see them as important. Vice versa we have to assume that the government has an easier job in convincing opposition parties to vote in line when an issue is considered important by government but not by opposition parties. These results do not only help in better understanding opposition behavior under minority government but also question the generalizability of the Trinity of Opposition and therewith our view on opposition goal setting.