This paper analyses the voting behaviour of the Italian Members of Parliament (MPs) in the period 1996-2006 to shed light on the relationship between majority and opposition parties in the legislative process. It moves from the counterintuitive finding that most legislative decisions are consensual even in the highly divisive environment of the Italian Second Republic. Government and opposition are continuously engaged in heated arguments, yet they show a surprising level of consensus when they vote laws in parliament. This finding is not restricted to the Italian political system, as previous research showed a surprisingly high level of consensus and cooperation between government and opposition in Western European parliamentary democracies. How can the reality of collaboration be reconciled with the rhetoric of conflict? The paper takes an agenda-setting approach to answer this question. Based on a recent re-elaboration on the theory of issue competition, it argues that in order to understand the relationship between majority and opposition we need to focus not only on the agendas of single political parties, but also on the party-system agenda emerging from broader political dynamics. Accordingly, the paper analyses how the relevance of policy problems in single party agendas and/or in the party system agenda affects the voting behaviour of MPs. The study covers the period 1996-2006, where centre-left and centre-right alternated in government, and is based on a dataset of roll-calls and party manifestos coded following the comparative agendas project coding scheme.
