Beyond Blurring: How Opposition Parties’ Communication Spills Over Across Arenas

Opposition parties are essential in parliamentary democracies for ensuring accountability and electoral choice (Dahl 1966). Criticism and the presentation of alternatives are key opposition functions that can influence government policies and voter preferences (Garritzmann 2017, Louwerse & Zorina 2025). Yet opposition parties are strategic actors that pursue different goals, and these goals tend to be emphasised differently across arenas of political action. In the electoral arena, for example, opposition parties often face stronger incentives to be vote-seeking and to signal distinctiveness, whereas the parliamentary arena rewards policy-seeking behaviour and cooperation aimed at policy influence (Andeweg 2013). While prior research often treats these arenas as distinct, this paper argues that opposition communication inside and outside parliament is deeply interlinked and can mutually constrain each other (see also Conti et al. 2019, Jensen & Seeberg 2015, Tuttnauer & Wegmann 2022). The paper asks: How does the communicative behaviour of opposition parties inside and outside parliament influence each other? On the one hand, policy influence in parliament often depends on cooperation and negotiating with government parties. Under such conditions, adversarial electoral communication can strain inter-party relationships and narrow the room for manoeuvre in parliamentary negotiations. On the other hand, electoral competition creates strong incentives for differentiation. Visible cooperation with government parties in parliament can therefore diminish opposition credibility in the electoral arena. Building on Andeweg’s (2013) argument on the “blurring of opposition”, this study conceptualises cross-arena opposition behaviour as a set of patterns in which opposition parties adjust their behaviour accordingly to the different demands of the arenas of political action. Empirically, the study uses large language models to annotate and analyse opposition communication in parliamentary speeches, party press releases, and social media, covering a diverse sample of 65 opposition parties in six countries over ten years. The analysis focuses on two core communicative functions: criticism towards the government and the emphasis on alternatives and examines how opposition behaviour spills from on arena to the other. By analysing the interplay of opposition strategies across arenas, this paper advances the understanding of how opposition parties manage the tension created by competing goals.