Changed Conditions For Parliamentary Opposition

We may consider opposition in a very broad sense as an act of uttering dissatisfaction, hindering or trying to amend an initiative originating from the government. The more an opposition parties become involved, the more policy-affecting it becomes. This paper argues that parliamentary opposition is conditioned by how political parties compete for winning votes, and that the form of party competition has changed over the recent decades in a profound way due to broader societal changes of the electorate, like the ones identified by Inglehart (1987), Dalton and Flanagan (1999) and others that take place across advances industrialised democracies. Core constituencies of political parties have weakened, and media exposure with critique of the government has become essential. This means that the conditions for parliamentary opposition have also changed. If we follow Strøm (1990) and consider political parties to seek a combination of three goals: Office, policy, or votes, then these changes may at the same time have strengthened the expressive mode of opposition and weakened the direct policy-affecting mode of parliamentary opposition. In one regard it has strengthened parliamentary opposition because critique may actually affect agenda-setting in public and in parliament (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2011; Braüninger and Debus 2010) much stronger than used to be the case. However, in another regard opposition parties without core constituencies may have a harder to time to make stable deals with other parties and thereby influence policy-making without actually holding public office or compensating for this loss through institutionalised deal-making. I try to evaluate the argument on indicators for Western European countries over the last decades. These will include analysis of legislative activity. A special focus will be kept on opposition in parliamentary democracies during minority government.