Opposition parties in European legislatures : conflict or consensus? 9781315561011, 1315561018, 9781317200000, 1317200004, 9781317200017, 1317200012, 9781317200024, 1317200020

Table of contents :
Introduction / Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi --
Denmark : strengthened opposition, yet high levels of cooperation / Flemming Juul Christiansen --
Germany : heated debates but cooperative behaviour / Christian Stecker --
The netherlands : the reinvention of consensus democracy / Simon Otjes, Tom Louwerse, Arco Timmermans --
Italy : when responsibility fails : parliamentary opposition in times of crisis / Francesco Marangoni and Luca Verzichelli --
Portugal : the unexpected path of far left parties, from permanent opposition to government support / Elisabetta De Giorgi and Federico Russo --
Spain : government and opposition cooperation in a multi-level context / Ana Palau and Luz Munoz --
Czech Republic : weak governments and divided opposition in times of crisis / Petra Guasti and Zdenka Mansfeldova --
Hungary : the de(con)struction of parliamentary opposition / Réka Várnagy and Gabriella Ilonszki --
Poland : opposition in the making / Agnieszka Dudzinska and Witold Betkiewicz --
Romania : an ambivalent parliamentary opposition / Sergiu Gherghina and Mihail Chiru --
Switzerland : when opposition is in government / Jan Rosset, Andrea Pilotti, Yannis Papadopoulos --
Conclusions / Elisabetta De Giorgi and Gabriella Ilonszki.

Citation preview

Opposition Parties in European Legislatures

Democratic theory considers it fundamental for parties in government to be both responsive to their electorate and responsible to internal and international constraints. But recently these two roles have become more and more incompatible with Mair’s growing divide in European party systems between parties which claim to represent, but don’t deliver, and those which deliver, but are no longer seen to represent truer than ever. This book contains a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the behaviour of the opposition parties in eleven European democracies across Western and East Central Europe. Specifically, it investigates the parliamentary behaviour of the opposition parties, and shows that the party context is increasingly diverse. It demonstrates the emergence of two distinct types of opposition: one more cooperative, carried out by the mainstream parties (those with government aspirations), and one more adversarial focusing on government scrutiny rather than on policy alternatives (parties permanently excluded from power). It systematically and analytically explores the sources of their behaviour, whilst acknowledging that opposition is broader than its mere parliamentary behaviour. Finally, it considers the European agenda and the economic crisis as two possible intervening variables that might have an impact on the opposition parties’ behaviour and the government–opposition relations. As such, it responds to questions that are major concerns for the European democracies of the new millennium. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of political parties, European politics, comparative politics and democracy. Elisabetta De Giorgi is a Researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI) of the NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. Gabriella Ilonszki is Professor of Political Science at Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary, and Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Routledge Studies on Political Parties and Party Systems Series Editors: Ingrid van Biezen Leiden University, the Netherlands and

Fernando Casal Bértoa University of Nottingham, UK

This new series focuses on major issues affecting political parties in a broad sense. It welcomes a wide-range of theoretical and methodological approaches on political parties and party systems in Europe and beyond, including comparative works examining regions outside of Europe. In particular, it aims to improve our present understanding of these topics through the examination of the crisis of political parties and challenges party organizations face in the contemporary world, the increasing internal complexity of party organizations in terms of regulation, funding, membership, the more frequent presence of party system change, and the development of political parties and party systems in under-researched countries. The Regulation of Post-Communist Party Politics Edited by Fernando Casal Bértoa and Ingrid van Biezen Party Systems in Young Democracies Varieties of institutionalization in Sub-Saharan Africa Edalina Rodrigues Sanches Opposition Parties in European Legislatures Conflict or Consensus? Edited by Elisabetta De Giorgi and Gabriella Ilonszki For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-on-Political-Parties-and-Party-Systems/book-series/PPPS

Opposition Parties in European Legislatures Conflict or Consensus?

Edited by Elisabetta De Giorgi and Gabriella Ilonszki

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Elisabetta De Giorgi and Gabriella Ilonszki; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Elisabetta De Giorgi and Gabriella Ilonszki to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-67487-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-56101-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Figures Tables Contributors

vii ix xiii

1 Introduction

1

G A B R I E L L A I LONS Z KI AND E L I S ABE T TA DE GI ORG I

2 Denmark: strengthened opposition, yet high levels of cooperation

17

F L E M M I N G J U U L CHRI S T I ANS E N

3 Germany: heated debates but cooperative behaviour

35

C H R I S T I A N S T E CKE R

4 The Netherlands: the reinvention of consensus democracy

53

S I M O N O T J E S , TOM L OUWE RS E AND ARCO T I MMER MA N S

5 Italy: when responsibility fails. Parliamentary opposition in times of crisis

73

F R A N C E S C O MARANGONI AND L UCA VE RZ I CHELLI

6 Portugal: the unexpected path of far left parties, from permanent opposition to government support

95

E L I S A B E T TA D E GI ORGI AND F E DE RI CO RUS S O

7 Spain: government and opposition cooperation in a multi-level context

113

A N N A M . PA L AU AND L UZ MUÑOZ

8 Czech Republic: weak governments and divided opposition in times of crisis P E T R A G U A S T I AND Z DE NKA MANS F E L DOVÁ

133

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Contents

9 Hungary: the de(con)struction of parliamentary opposition

151

R É K A V Á R NAGY AND GABRI E L L A I L ONS Z KI

10 Poland: opposition in the making

171

A G N I E S Z K A DUDZ I Ń S KA AND WI TOL D BE T KIEWICZ

11 Romania: an ambivalent parliamentary opposition

191

S E R G I U G H E RGHI NA AND MI HAI L CHI RU

12 Switzerland: when opposition is in government

211

J A N R O S S E T, ANDRE A P I L OT T I AND YANNI S PA PA D O PO U LO S

13 Conclusions

229

E L I S A B E T TA DE GI ORGI AND GABRI E L L A I L O N SZK I

Index

247

Figures

1.1 The opposition parties’ goals and strategies 3.1 Number of bills and success rate by initiator (1991–2016) 5.1 Monthly average of individual acts of oversight (Interpellations/ Questions) from oppositions MPs 10.1 Comparison of the dynamics of the opposition’s support for government and the dynamics of passing the opposition’s bills (1997–2015) 12.1 Share of favourable votes to government bills, by parliamentary group (1999–2011) 12.2 Frequency and evolution of legislative coalitions in the National Council (percentage)

3 47 86 182 216 221

Tables

1.1 Factors that might have a positive/negative effect on the conflict potential in the 11 countries under analysis 2.1 Political parties in the Danish parliament (2005–2016) 2.2 Government and opposition composition (2005–2016) 2.3 Percentage of favourable votes for government bills by all parties, per government (2005–2016) 2.4 Parliamentary activities of all parties, per government (2005–2016) 3.1 Political parties in the German parliament (1991–2017) 3.2 Government and opposition composition (1991–2013) 3.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1991–2013) 3.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Germany (1991–2013) 3.5 Parliamentary questions of all parties, per government (2002–2017) 4.1 Political parties in the Dutch parliament (1998–2017) 4.2 Government and opposition composition (1998–2014) 4.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1998–2014) 4.4 Parliamentary questions of all parties, per government (1998–2014) 4.5 Motions of all parties, per government (1998–2014) 4.6 Policy agreements between coalition and opposition (2012–2015) 5.1 Political parties in the Italian parliament (1996–2017) 5.2 Government and opposition composition (1996–2017) 5.3 Index of consensus for government’s bills, mean value (and standard deviation) by party group (1996–2016) 5.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Italy (1996–2016)

11 19 21 22 26 37 38 40 43 45 54 55 57 63 65 66 76 78 80 84

x

Tables

5.5 Parliamentary activities of all parties, per government (1996–2016) 6.1 Political parties in the Portuguese parliament (1995–2015) 6.2 Government and opposition composition (1995–2015) 6.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1995–2015) 6.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Portugal (1995–2015) 6.5 Parliamentary activities of all parties, per government (2005–2015) 7.1 Political parties in the Spanish parliament (1996–2015) 7.2 Government and opposition composition (1996–2015) 7.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1996–2015) 7.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Spain (1996–2015) 7.5 Parliamentary activities of all parties, per government (1996–2015) 8.1 Political parties in the Czech parliament (2003–2013) 8.2 Government and opposition composition (2003–2013) 8.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (2003–2013) 8.4 Percentage of oral interpellations by party (2007–2009) 8.5 Percentage of written interpellations by party and parliamentary term (2003–2013) 9.1 Political parties in the Hungarian parliament (1998–2014) 9.2 Government and opposition composition (1994–2014) 9.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1998–2014) 9.4 Voting correlation between parties 9.5 Parliamentary activities of all parties, per government (1998–2014) 10.1 Political parties in the Polish parliament (1997–2015) 10.2 Government and opposition composition (1997–2015) 10.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1997–2015) 10.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Poland (1997–2015) 11.1 Political parties in the Romanian parliament (2007–2011) 11.2 Government and opposition composition (2007–2011) 11.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (2007–2011) 11.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Romania (2007–2011)

87 96 97 100 102 105 114 115 118 119 122 135 136 138 141 142 154 155 157 159 162 173 175 177 180 193 194 197 198

Tables

11.5 Parliamentary activities of all parties, per government (2007–2012) 12.1 Political parties in the Swiss parliament (1999–2011) 12.2 Government and opposition composition (1999–2011) 12.3 Parliamentary initiatives by political actors in 2006 and 2010 13.1 Conflict or consensus? The opposition parties’ voting behaviour in 11 European countries

xi

204 213 215 219 231

Contributors

Witold Betkiewicz is an assistant professor of sociology at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His academic interest concerns local, regional elites as well as public administration institutions and their behavior. Recently he published “Odmiany profesjonalizacji wielkomiejskiej elity politycznej” [Variations of Professionalization of the Metropolitan Political Elite], Studia Polityczne [Political Studies] 2016/1; Polski model kariery zawodowej urzędników wyższego szczebla” [Polish Model of Professional Careers of the Highest Civil Servants], Studia Polityczne 2014/3. Contact: [email protected] Mihail Chiru is a postdoctoral researcher at Median Research Centre, Bucharest. He is mainly interested in legislative behaviour, candidate campaigns and party politics. Contact: [email protected] Flemming Juul Christiansen is Assistant Professor at Roskilde University. His main interests are legislative bargaining, parliamentary governments and political parties. With co-authors or alone he has published in American Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics, West European Politics, among others. Contact: [email protected] Elisabetta De Giorgi is a Researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI) of the NOVA University of Lisbon. Her main research interests are parliaments from a comparative perspective and political parties. She has published several articles in national and international journals – in Acta Politica, Journal of Legislative Studies, Italian Political Science Review, South European Society and Politics, among others – and the book L’opposizione parlamentare in Italia. Dall’antiberlusconismo all’antipolitica (2016). Contact: [email protected]

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Contributors

Agnieszka Dudzińska, sociologist, works at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her research interests involve legislation, political system, public policy, political institutions and representation. Expert at several government institutions. In 2015, she published a book, System zamknięty. Socjologiczna analiza procesu legislacyjnego [The Closed System. A Sociological Analysis of Legislative Process]. Contact: [email protected] Sergiu Gherghina is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow. His research interests lie in party politics, legislative and voting behaviour, democratisation and the use of direct democracy. Contact: [email protected] Petra Guasti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt and senior associate researcher in the Department of Political Sociology, IS CAS in Prague. Her research focuses on political institutionalisation and participation in political terms (parties and parliament) and the non-political meso-structures, democratisation and democratic innovations. Contact: [email protected] Gabriella Ilonszki, Professor of Political Science, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include parliamentary and party developments in East Central Europe, both in institutional and personnel aspects, including leaders, elites and women. Contact: [email protected] Tom Louwerse is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on parliamentary politics, political parties and elections. He has published in leading journals, including Electoral Studies, Party Politics, Political Studies and West European Politics. Contact: [email protected] Zdenka Mansfeldová is a senior research fellow and Head of the Department of Political Sociology at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences. She has specialised in political sociology and has concentrated on the study of the functioning of modern democracies and their institutions, quality of governance, emerging security threats, political and non-political forms of interest representation, with a long-lasting interest in social dialogue. Contact: [email protected] Francesco Marangoni is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Siena, where he teaches public policy analysis and social policy. He has published several articles and essays in the fields of comparative

Contributors

xv

political institutions and political elites. Among his recent works, Il Governo (il Mulino, 2015, with Maurizio Cotta) and The Challenge of Coalition Government: The Italian Case (Routledge, co-edited with Nicolò Conti). Contact: [email protected] Luz Muñoz is a postdoc researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona. She has been a visiting researcher at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology of the University of Newcastle (2013), Faculty of Law at the Universidad Iberoamericana (2013) and the Center for American Politics and Public Policy, University of Washington (2009). Her research focuses on agenda setting and government–opposition dynamics. Other topics of interest are interest groups politics, advocacy groups and legal mobilisation. Contact: [email protected] Simon Otjes is a researcher at the Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties of Groningen University. He is specialised in party politics and legislative behaviour. He has previously published in the American Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research and Party Politics. Contact: [email protected] Anna M. Palau is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona. Her research focuses on the analysis of agenda-setting dynamics and parliamentary behaviour. She is co-author of the book Agenda Dynamics in Spain (Palgrave) and has published her research in journals like European Union Politics, Comparative Political Studies, West European Politics, Journal of Public Policy and Journal of Legislative Studies, among others. Contact: [email protected] Yannis Papadopoulos is a Professor of Swiss politics and public policy at the Institute of Political, Historical and International Studies, University of Lausanne. He is a co-editor of the Handbuch der Schweizer Politik-Manuel de la politique Suisse (Zurich, NZZ Verlag, 5th updated ed., 2014; English translation: Handbook of Swiss Politics, NZZ Publishing, 2nd updated ed. 2007), where he was responsible for the section on policymaking processes and he co-authored the chapter on the federal government. He has recently worked on the impact of Europeanisation and of the rise of populism on the domestic power balance and decision making. Contact: [email protected] Andrea Pilotti is a researcher at the Institute of Political, Historical and International Studies, University of Lausanne. His current research interests include parliamentary recruitment as well as urban and regional politics.

xvi

Contributors

He recently published a book on Swiss parliamentary recruitment and the reforms of the Federal Assembly (Entre démocratisation et professionnalisation: le Parlement suisse et ses membres de 1910 à 2016, Zurich, Seismo Verlag, 2017). He is member of the Swiss Elite Observatory at the University of Lausanne (www.unil.ch/obelis). Contact: [email protected] Jan Rosset is a research and teaching fellow at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva. His research centres on comparative politics, political representation and the link between economic and political inequality and has appeared in academic journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Legislative Studies or West European Politics. His book Economic Inequality and Political Representation in Switzerland was published by Springer in 2016. Contact: [email protected] Federico Russo is Senior Researcher at Department of History, Society and Human Sciences of the University of Salento (Italy), where he teaches Political Science and International Relations. His research interests focus on political representation, comparative legislative studies and European integration. Contact: [email protected] Christian Stecker is a postdoctoral researcher and project director at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. His research focuses on the design of democratic institutions, minority governance, party competition and legislative politics. His work has been published in journals including the European Journal of Political Research, Political Analysis, Party Politics, and West European Politics. Contact: [email protected] Arco Timmermans is Professor of Public Affairs at the Institute of Public Administration at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs at Leiden University. His teaching is about public policy in the Netherlands and the EU, interest representation and public affairs. His research is on the dynamics of the public and political agenda. He analyzes how interest groups play the game of politics, form coalitions, and how they find access to venues for influence. This teaching and research work also is oriented to promoting the dialogue between research and practice. Contact: [email protected] Réka Várnagy, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Corvinus University of Budapest. In her research she focuses on parties and party development and legislative issues. Contact: [email protected]

Contributors

xvii

Luca Verzichelli is Professor of Political Science at the University of Siena, where he teaches political communication and global politics. Among his research interests, political elites in Europe and comparative political institutions. He is co-author of Political Institutions in Italy (Oxford University Press, 2007) and co-editor of The Europe of Elite (Oxford University Press, 2012). Contact: [email protected]

1

Introduction Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi

There are many types and forms of opposition in modern societies and the day-to-day usage of the word encompasses a wide “variety of developments” (Blondel, 1997, p. 462).1 However, as opposition has evolved, it has become mainly associated with the institutionalisation of political conflict (Rokkan, 1970) together with the rise of modern democracy. The present volume, therefore, focuses on the specific form of opposition carried out by political parties within parliament, that is, parliamentary opposition. The modern concept of parliamentary opposition has evolved alongside the development and institutionalisation of inter-party conflicts in the parliamentary framework and it has been applied in diverse forms in different countries over the years. Indeed, the meaning attached to it varies in line with the countries’ specific trends of conflict and cooperation, which may in turn be affected by a large number of factors. The major purpose of this comparative book is to shed light on how parliamentary opposition behaves in each of the countries considered and what affects this behaviour. The aim is also to determine whether variation continues to be the main characteristic of this political actor both within and among countries, as formerly argued (Dahl, 1966), or whether a common trend can be identified in (some of) the countries under analysis. This process has three potential outcomes. First, we may continue to find the extreme variation in opposition behaviour identified in Dahl’s classic volume on opposition in 1966. To some extent, this is to be expected as the nature and management of political conflicts remain rooted in a wide range of politics and institutions (Sartori, 1966; Helms, 2008). Furthermore, since the publication of Dahl’s volume, this variation has been fostered by the formation of many new democracies. Second, we might also find some general shared trends. The overarching umbrella of the European Union has inevitably influenced the behaviour of both governments and oppositions. In addition, parliamentary opportunity structures have changed in many European countries along the same lines (von Beyme, 1987; Fish, 2005) and we believe this evolution has played a role in (re)shaping the opposition’s conduct in recent years. Third and finally, there have been new developments in many European countries, which might have responded to these challenges in various ways. In particular, it is

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Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi

likely that the transformation of the party context – notably the success of new party families (Mair, 1997, 2011; Bardi et al., 2014) – and the economic crisis (Bosco and Verney, 2012; Moury and De Giorgi, 2015) have had an impact on the opposition’s behaviour. It remains to be seen whether (and how) these new developments have led to more varied opposition’s conduct or pushed general patterns to evolve. Parliamentary opposition is not a unitary force, as it is always formed by numerous actors, that is, political parties. Thus, to understand the role and functions of parliamentary opposition, it is paramount to examine how individual parties relate with the government and how they interact with each other in this process. Their complex connections will be the primary focus of this book. Parliamentary opposition is defined herein as a political actor composed of one or several party groups that oppose the governing forces; its aim is to exercise control and appear in parliament as a challenger that provides an alternative to the government in political and policy terms. This book analyses the three main activities undertaken by opposition parties in parliament to this end: voting on legislation, proposing legislation and scrutinising the government. The following sections briefly describe the distinctions in the way the opposition exercises its prerogatives in parliament vis-à-vis several systemic and non-systemic variables. Hypotheses will be formulated about their impact in three broad areas in particular: the party context, the institutional setting in which parties interact and some specific external constraints, namely the onset of the global financial crisis and the EU’s increasing intervention in this context – leading to novelties, variation, and general patterns in the opposition behaviour.

The party context The rich academic literature on party developments presents an array of arguments about partisan features that might impact the behaviour/activities of the opposition in parliament. In addition to streamlining these arguments below, we identify their potential effect on the opposition’s activity in three broad categories: the nature of parties, the nature of the party system and the nature of the opposition itself. The party perspective

The two major approaches used to explain party behaviour are equally applicable to the behaviour of opposition parties. Whereas the first argues that parties are strategic actors and their goals determine their conduct, the second claims that parties’ behaviour is a result of structural attributes. According to the first approach, the behaviour of parties on both the opposition and government benches in parliament is driven by electoral, position-seeking and

Introduction 3

policy-seeking goals because their overriding objective is to gain votes and positions and implement policies (Müller and Strøm, 1999; Andeweg and Nijzink, 1995; Pedersen, 2012). Behind a vote for or against a policy related government bill, numerous electoral considerations or prospective office-related expectations are played out (Brauninger and Debus, 2009) even in opposition. However, these strategic motivations will depend on party attributes as “some parties are better suited for strategic action than others” (Rovny, 2015, p. 916). For example, a major party with many diverse and often contradictory interests will exercise the role of opposition differently from a minor party, which groups just a few interests in a particularly well-defined manner. Variation in the parties’ features remains a major explanatory source of opposition behaviour (Pedersen, 2012). One of the factors that affects behaviour in opposition is the party’s political history – for example, its tradition and parliamentary experience (Steinack, 2011). The context in which a party is formed, notably in new democracies, might well matter. The behavioural messages sent by successor parties will differ from those of new parties: the former might be less confrontational to prove their cooperation potential, while the latter might adopt more confrontational strategies to build a genuinely new profile and identity. Party novelty, or more broadly, party age and experience will be decisive in these matters. Additionally, even a simple organisational feature like party size can be expected to result in different behaviours: small parties concentrate on scrutiny activity rather than propose policy initiatives that require considerable resources. As Figure 1.1 shows, it is essential to consider (and test) the combination of a party’s strategic aims and structural attributes when explaining opposition party behaviour in the following chapters.

Figure 1.1 The opposition parties’ goals and strategies

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Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi

The three aspects of the opposition’s parliamentary behaviour analysed herein are expected to serve the parties’ goals in different ways. Voting for or against government initiatives is largely tied to office-seeking and voteseeking goals. This will be the most sensitive parliamentary activity for the opposition parties, as it allows them to express their political stances more clearly: it shows whether or not they are relentless challengers of the government, and sends a clear message to their potential constituency. On these grounds, we expect to find the most clear-cut behavioural patterns of opposition in this activity. The opposition’s scrutiny activity is linked primarily to office and policy goals and has a different force: an office related confidence motion or a “simple” parliamentary question will serve different party objectives. Moreover, scrutiny will depend on the diverse intra-parliamentary regulations of each country. Thus, it can be rightly assumed that the opposition’s behaviour will vary greatly in this context and possible patterns will not be so clearly defined. New legislative initiatives of the opposition parties will be motivated mainly by policy goals, as occasionally the desire of attracting voters’ attention can play a role in this. Parliament is not the terrain for the opposition to achieve its own policy results, not to speak of how costly policy initiative is overall; we therefore expect more modest activity in this context than in the other two. The party system perspective

Following the former line of thought, opposition party behaviour will depend on the nature of the party system as well as on how parties connect and how their political space is organised. When writing about the structure of the party system, Duverger (1951) stated that multi-partism and bipartism gave rise to different opposition patterns (p. 414), although this is more than a simple numerical relationship. The following are of paramount importance for the opposition’s behaviour: the level of polarisation of the party system, i.e. higher polarisation might trigger a generally higher level of conflict in terms of action; and whether there is a major party that is difficult to challenge or alternatively several small/medium-size parties with more opportunities to negotiate. This generates different behavioural considerations from the opposition’s perspective. The party system structure matters even within the opposition area. When the opposition party system is polarised, parties can be expected to follow more individualistic strategies, and this might also be the case when the opposition is fragmented. The opposition party system will consequently affect the parties’ goals and their strategy to achieve them: vote, office and policy considerations will appear in a different light depending on the specific opposition context.

Introduction 5 The opposition perspective

The opposition’s government potential or vocation is another fundamental feature affecting its conduct. This idea was first developed by Giovanni Sartori (1966). “An opposition which knows that it may be called to ‘respond’, i.e. which is oriented towards governing and has a reasonable chance to govern [. . .] is likely to behave responsibly, in a restrained and realistic fashion. On the other hand, a ‘permanent opposition’ which (. . .) knows it will not be called on to respond, is likely to take the path of ‘irresponsible opposition’ ” (ibid., p. 35). Although Sartori was thinking mainly of the Italian case and its polarised multiparty system, the distinction between responsible and irresponsible opposition is still expected to be relevant.2 According to the theory of responsible party government, parties should be both responsive to their electorate and responsible for what they do in government.3 These two concepts have become increasingly incompatible in the last decade (Bardi et al., 2014; Freire et al., 2014; Rose, 2014); indeed, some scholars have started to speak of a “growing divide” in European party systems between parties that govern but are no longer able to represent, and parties that claim to represent but do not govern. The latter constitute what Mair (2011) calls the “new opposition”: they (almost) never hold any government responsibility and can consequently maintain a high level of responsiveness to their electorate; they are usually characterised by a strong populist rhetoric although they cannot be defined as “anti-system” in Sartori’s use of the term (1976). However, as Kriesi states, such a sharp division of labour between these two types of party seems too static (2014, p. 368). The so-called new opposition parties may, in fact, enter the government in a subsequent election and the division of labour envisaged by Mair may therefore be transitory rather than permanent. Indeed, some extreme right and populist right parties aim to acquire government responsibility, and some have actually managed to do so (Akkerman et al., 2016; Ágh, 2016; Enyedi, 2016; Minkenberg, 2013). In Eastern and Central Europe (ECE), new parties – frequently with a radical populist agenda – took a position in government immediately after entering parliament without spending any time on the opposition benches. Thus, we can assume that their responsiveness versus responsibility credentials are blurred (Grotz and Weber, 2016). Nonetheless, permanent opposition parties do exist in most European democracies and we claim that the temporary versus permanent opposition status would significantly affect the parties’ choices in parliament. With this distinction in mind, we identify two major goals for opposition parties: leaving opposition, that is, getting into government as soon as possible; and exploiting opposition, that is, trying to take advantage of the opposition status. These goals might give rise to two very different behavioural strategies depending on the party’s opposition status. A temporary opposition party – i.e. one that has been alternating in power – would consider getting into government a feasible

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Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi

goal. Thus, we expect these opposition parties to be more cooperative in terms of voting behaviour and more passive in other parliamentary activity, notably legislative initiative and scrutiny activity. As Sartori said, these parties know they will be held accountable for their actions, but, we add, they could soon be in the government’s position. They therefore usually keep a more moderate profile in their confrontation with the executive, except in the presence of relevant programmatic issues or media attention. As for the second goal, we expect parties, notably those permanently in opposition, to act in a more adversarial way as well as to be more active; successful parliamentary activity and the actions of opposition parties outside of parliament increase their electoral opportunities and chances of getting into parliament again. Increased confrontation often gives more visibility to the actors involved, so they can exploit their opposition status in this way. Under favourable conditions, this might even bring about government status for them: either electoral considerations or governing rationale might make these parties fly into a governing position. All this implies that the two main opposition goals may overlap. These hypotheses will be tested in the country chapters.

Institutional framework and opportunities Both in government and in opposition, parties act and perform in specific institutional contexts that provide them with varying opportunity structures. This section aims to summarise the institutional opportunities for the opposition parties and the effects they have on their behaviour. Focus will be placed, in particular, on the impact of the structure of competition, type of government, presence of strong veto powers and rules of the parliamentary game. Broadly speaking, consensus oriented political systems provide more opportunities for the opposition than majoritarian democracies (Lijphart, 1999). Although this differentiation is mostly based on other than the parliamentary features (like the electoral system, government characteristics, type of judicial review, etc.), this divide still informs us about how opposition opportunities evolve in the parliamentary framework, how decisions are taken, how many actors and decision points are involved, and how many veto players there are. Furthermore, various majority requirements in the government formation and/ or the decision-making process (Bergman, 1993) will influence the conflict or cooperation patterns between government and opposition actors. In majoritarian democracies, competition structures tend to be closed and predictable; in contrast, they are more open and unpredictable in consensus democracies and depend on the patterns of alternation in government, more particularly relating to the range of parties obtaining access to government (Mair, 1997). Where wholesale alternation prevails, i.e. the entire government is replaced, the opposition can and must play a more conflict-ridden political game. On the other hand, where there is partial alternation, i.e. opposition

Introduction 7

parties possibly overlap in government with their former rivals, more consensus can be expected. Partial government alternation is expected to imply more cooperative behaviour from parties as they must maintain good connections in view of a prospective cooperation (Louwerse et al., 2016). Wholesale alternation is less likely when opposition is fragmented; although this does imply not only less clear-cut accountability patterns (Best, 2013) but presumably also different and more conflictual behaviour. We can also expect that a constitutionally strong head of state might change the government–opposition relationships. Presidential veto rights or the president’s partisan sympathies towards a particular party will affect government– opposition dynamics (Millard, 2000; Protsyk, 2006; Sedelius and Ekman, 2010). Second chambers might also provide additional opportunities for nongoverning parties. Although the chapters in this volume will focus exclusively on the first chambers, the opposition’s mere potential of having substantial support and blocking certain decisions in the “other house” will bring about anticipatory behaviour on the side of the government (Manow and Burkhart, 2007), and thus provide the opposition with considerable opportunities. The government’s strength and composition is an additional institutional constraint on the opposition parties’ opportunities and behaviour (Powell, 2000). The opposition’s opportunities when executive power is concentrated in a strong single-party majority cabinet are different vis-à-vis those in minority or multiparty coalition governments. In the former case, parliamentary opposition rarely has any significant room of manoeuvre or space to negotiate with the government in office, which is already supported by a strong and disciplined single-party majority. Nevertheless, the opposition is obliged to put itself forward as an alternative in order to compete for power at the following election. In the second case, the life of parliamentary opposition seems to be more advantageous, particularly for smaller parties, as they represent crucial allies for the government so that it can be assured of a majority in parliament when divisions on legislation occur (Pasquino, 1995). Finally, the rules of the parliamentary game are thought to influence the opposition’s behaviour, as they often represent the only resource available to opposition parties. The rights and space afforded to the opposition in parliament by institutional rules are fundamental. In fact, “most of the time oppositions can draw on only two resources in their relations with Governments: good reasons, and time” (King, 1976, p. 18). Time is provided by the institutional rules, while good reasons depend on complex partisan interactions (Andeweg and Nijzink, 1995). As far as the opposition’s opportunities in parliament are concerned, two paradoxes should be highlighted. First, on one hand, parliament has generally improved as a working place for the opposition: parliamentary reforms have given more visibility and opportunities to the opposition, parliaments have become more open by involving the public through different deliberative instruments and new media (Griffith and Leston-Bandeira, 2012) and the

8

Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi

opposition does not seem to be on the losing side in this process. On the other hand, the parliaments’ functions and relevance have been challenged in face of stronger executives and international – mostly European Union – requirements (Laffan, 2014; Goetz, 2014), although again the way national parliaments can maintain their position varies (Winzen, 2017). The opposition must clearly respond to these challenges but paradoxically its opportunities will depend on the strength of the entire parliament (Auel et al., 2015). The second paradox lies in the delicate link between formality and informality in the parliamentary arena. While the possibilities of getting informed are more informal for the government parties, for the opposition parties need to be regulated through formal rules (Schnapp and Harfts, 2005, p. 354). This is an important point to consider: paradoxically, we cannot gain a full picture of parliamentary deliberation and opposition parties’ behaviour by merely focusing on institutional opportunities and formal rules (Helms, 2008), even though these are essential for the opposition. This is one of the reasons why each chapter in the book will try to combine qualitative descriptive analysis with empirical data analysis. Lastly, the relative impact of the partisan and institutional variables remains to be seen when both partisan and institutional dynamics are in the making, as happens in the new democracies.

The external constraints In addition to the potential impact of partisan and institutional explanations, two external contexts should be considered to understand conflict and consensus in opposition. The dilemma between conflict and consensus tends to prevail in “normal” times, but becomes even more evident when for some reasons painful decisions must be made or a new constraint, such as an economic crisis, challenges the status quo. What is more advantageous? Does a crisis provide the opportunity to attack the rival or does cooperation remain more useful? The onset of the global financial crisis made this theoretical question a pragmatic reality. We regard that and the expansion of the EU intervention in the national decision making of the member states as the two “external” challenges which placed policy decisions in a new light for both the government and the opposition and, more particularly, for the government and opposition parties. The powers and prerogatives of national legislatures have undoubtedly been affected by the process of European integration: parliaments have lost part of their legislative sovereignty, and their remaining legislative competencies are framed by European legislation. At the same time, the executives have been strengthened thanks to their direct involvement in EU decision making. Nevertheless, recent research demonstrates that “it is rather difficult to maintain the argument that national parliaments are not interested or involved in EU affairs” (Auel et al., 2015, p. 75). We can expect that even if opposition parties make rather symbolic contributions to policymaking, i.e. legitimating decisions that

Introduction 9

were taken elsewhere (Raunio and Hix, 2000), the conflict versus consensus dynamic will emerge between government and opposition on European issues. This is particularly so when there is a deep divide among parties, whether a government versus opposition divide or a divide within the opposition. Euroscepticism – and conversely pro-European attitudes – has always influenced government–opposition dynamics and the party competition at the national level (Hooghe et al., 2004; Sitter, 2001, 2002; Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2003; Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2008). On this basis, we expect pro- and anti-European attitudes to play a crucial role in shaping the conduct of political parties in national legislatures. In particular, we posit that traditionally proEuropean parties are more likely to cooperate with the government on proposals that follow the EU recommendations/order and the Eurosceptic parties to have less incentive to collaborate when the EU is influencing legislation (De Giorgi et al., 2015; Palau et al., 2015). The parties’ pro- or anti-European attitudes are closely related to the parties’ mainstream versus extreme character. In fact, parties that are permanently out of government tend to be more Eurosceptic (Taggart, 1998; Conti and De Giorgi, 2011; Best et al., 2012), to such an extent that Sitter defines Euroscepticism as the “politics of opposition” (Sitter, 2001, p. 26). At a tactical level, several parties (particularly of the ‘new populist’ variety) have found it useful to invoke Euroscepticism in the electoral appeal against the governing party or coalition. Party behaviour in the new member states does not always follow the patterns of more established democracies, however. Around the accession period, Pridham argued that it was “strange that Eurosceptical parties when in opposition did not exploit the asymmetrical relationship between governments and Brussels” (2008, p. 101). Given the high number of new party formations, these observations might be put in a new light. It seems that the EU is not such a strong cementing force between parties as it used to be in ECE (Lengyel and Göncz, 2016). In addition, the presence of Eurosceptic parties in senior government positions – as in Hungary or Poland – challenges the perspective that Euroscepticism is a feature of the opposition. The EU divide was exacerbated by the impact of the recent economic crisis, notably in the most severely hit countries. The opposition parties’ behaviour is expected to vary in line with the impact of the crisis in their country and also with the national context of the partisan and institutional opportunities specified above. To put it bluntly, the question is whether the opposition parties’ behaviour will follow an externally or internally driven agenda. Maatsch (2016), for example, found that irrespective of their government or opposition position, parties voted cohesively on EU crisis policies, while the opposition parties’ voting behaviour on economic – largely austerity – measures depended on their general stand towards the European Union. That is, there was no significant connection between either their left-right position or their extremist position on the left-right scale and their vote. In light of these findings, party

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Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi

behaviour during the crisis versus pre-crisis patterns and whether they have become more or less active and in which field remain interesting questions for analysis. All in all, in these changing circumstances, opposition parties might either emphasise their adversarial character or develop new strategies and roles within the national parliaments by finding ways to take part in the decision making through cooperative behaviour. We expect that the choice between these alternatives will largely depend on the permanent versus temporary opposition divide, but possibly will exceed this divide.

Expectations in a diverse country framework This book investigates the abovementioned general expectations by focusing on 11 countries: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Switzerland. Table 1.1 provides a summary of the institutional, political and external variables referred to above and shows how we can expect government and opposition conflict and cooperation patterns to evolve in the selected countries. The “+” sign indicates more conflict between government and opposition, while the “−” sign indicates less conflict. In 8 of the 11 country cases there is at least one permanent opposition party in parliament (in the period covered). However, these parties act in varied contexts, which might affect their behaviour both in and outside of parliament. As to the expectations formulated at the beginning of this chapter, at first glance the table suggests the “extreme variation” expectation due to different levels of party polarisation, opposition fragmentation, crisis effect and EU divide. In contrast, there is a predominantly open structure of competition, which is a potential indicator of a generally less conflictual trend. In terms of conflict signs (+), Germany represents one extreme with the least conflict potential, while Hungary stands at the other extreme. These factors are obviously interconnected in a complex way, and country chapters will provide the final word about conflict and consensus patterns between government and opposition. The book includes a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the behaviour of opposition parties. All the chapters explore the same variables linked to the same dimensions, and rely on the same kind of quantitative data on the opposition parties’ voting behaviour, legislative initiative and scrutiny activity, covering a period of no less than two parliamentary terms in the last ten years. Only a few cases differ in this regard, either in terms of type of data or the period covered, due to difficulties in the data collection in individual countries. The respective chapters will account for any difference. Each chapter proposes a combination of empirical data analysis and qualitative descriptive analysis. This allows us to explore theories, confirm our expectations and/or check for alternative explanations as well as to understand the shifts between consensus

+ + + + +* + + +

− +**

−

− −

− − ****

−***

−

+

+ +

+ + + + + +

+ +

+ +

+ + + + + + + +

+ +

+

+ +

+

+ + +

+

+ + +

+ +

* Until 2015. ** In the period under analysis, the role of the head of state was rather the source of conflict. *** Only from 2010. **** The Czech Republic had a minority government for only one very short period.

Note 3: Veto players in our country cases are, in particular, the second chamber (in Germany) and the head of state (in Poland and Romania).

Note 2: Data refers to the period considered in each country chapter.

Note 1: + sign means the phenomenon exists in a given country and raises the potential level of conflict between government and opposition; − sign means the phenomenon exists in a given country and decreases the potential level of conflict between government and opposition.

Denmark Germany Netherlands Italy Portugal Spain Czech Rep. Hungary Poland Romania Switzerland

Permanent Strong Minority Closed New High High High Crisis High opposition veto governments structure of democracy party opposition opposition effects opposition players competition polarisation polarisation fragmentation divide on EU

Table 1.1 Factors that might have a positive/negative effect on the conflict potential in the 11 countries under analysis

12

Gabriella Ilonszki and Elisabetta De Giorgi

and dissent in the opposition behaviour and the possibly different (survival) strategies adopted by the opposition parties in recent years. Chapters are therefore structured as follows: the first section provides a description of the main characteristics of the political and party system that feature the government–opposition relationships in each country. This is followed by the main expectations on the impact of the key variables considered in the book, notably the party system structure and its possible transformation and the outbreak of the economic crisis, in addition to the country-specific characteristics that are expected to play a role in government–opposition dynamics and developments. Each chapter then examines the opposition parties’ voting behaviour in the legislative process, exploring its possible changes and its relative explanatory factors. A section will be devoted to the analysis of the opposition’s other activities in parliament besides voting on legislation: in particular, their legislative initiatives and scrutiny activity will be presented to observe which of the two major functions of parliaments – legislator or controller – the opposition parties prefer/adopt. Finally, each chapter accounts for the distinctiveness of the individual country case and recent developments that might shed light on the variation among countries.

Funding This work has been supported by the Portuguese National Funds through the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) within the projects UID/ CPO/04627/2013 and IF/00926/2015.

Notes 1 This chapter is the result of a joint work. Nonetheless, Elisabetta De Giorgi is particularly responsible for section 1 and 4, while Gabriella Ilonszki for sections 2 and 3. The introduction was written jointly. 2 A major difference between the former and recent times, however, is that both Dahl and Sartori claimed – to use Dahl’s wording – that the democratic Leviathan was challenged from the extreme left, while in the past decades mostly extreme right populist parties seem to have appeared in the role of irresponsible opposition (Mudde, 2007, 2014). 3 Following Bardi et al. (2014), the concept of responsiveness is generally associated with the tendency of political parties and their leaders to “sympathetically respond to the short-term demands of voters, public opinion, interest groups, and the media” (p. 237). In contrast, responsibility is identified with the need for the same parties to consider first “the long-term needs of their people and countries (. . .) and go beyond the short-term demands”; “the claims of audiences other than the national electoral audience” (ibid., p. 237), including international markets and organisations, and at the European level, the commitments to the common currency and common market come in second place.

References Ágh, A. (2016). Decline of democracy and increasing populism in East-Central Europe. ECPR Joint Sessions, Pisa, 24–28 April 2016.

Introduction 13 Akkerman, T., de Lange, S. L., and Rooduijn, M. (2016). Into the Mainstream? A Comparative Analysis of the Programmatic Profiles of Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe over Time. In T. Akkerman, S. L. de Lange, and M. Rooduijn (Eds.) Radical Right Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream? London and New York: Routledge, 31–52. Andeweg, R. B. and Nijzink, L. (1995). Beyond the Two-Body Image: Relations between Ministers and MPs. In H. Döring (Ed.) Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe. Mannheim: University of Mannheim, MZES, 152–178. Auel, K., Rozenberg, O., and Tacea, A. (2015). Fighting Back? And, If So, How? Measuring Parliamentary Strength and Activity in EU Affairs. In C. Hefftler, C. Neuhold, O. Rozenberg, and J. Smith (Eds.) The Palgrave Handbook National Parliaments and the European Union. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 60–93. Bardi, L., Bartolini, S., and Trechsel, A. (2014). Responsive and Responsible? The Role of Parties in Twenty-First Century Politics. West European Politics, 37(2), 235–252. Bergman, T. (1993). Formation Rules and Minority Governments. European Journal of Political Research, 23, 56–66. Best, H., Lengyel, G., and Verzichelli, L. (Eds.) (2012). The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Best, R. E. (2013). How Party System Fragmentation Has Altered Political Opposition in Established Democracies. Government and Opposition, 48(3), 314–342. Blondel, J. (1997). Political Opposition in the Contemporary World. Government and Opposition, 32(4), 462–486. Bosco, A. and Verney, S. (2012). Electoral Epidemic: The Political Cost of Economic Crisis in Southern Europe, 2010–11. South European Society and Politics, 17(2), 129–154. Brauninger, T. and Debus, M. (2009). Legislative Agenda-Setting in Parliamentary Democracies. European Journal of Political Research, 48(6), 804–839. Conti, N. and De Giorgi, E. (2011). Euroscetticismo solo a parole? Lega nord e Rifondazione comunista, tra retorica e comportamento istituzionale. Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 41(2), 265–289. Dahl, R. (Ed.) (1966). Political Oppositions in Western Democracies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dalton, R. J. (2008). The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems Party System Polarization, Its Measurement, and Its Consequences. Comparative Political Studies, 41(7), 899–920. De Giorgi, E., Moury, C., and Ruivo, J. P. (2015). Incumbents, Opposition and International Lenders: Governing Portugal in Times of Crisis. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 21(1), 54–74. Döring, H. (2001). Parliamentary Agenda Control and Legislative outcomes in Western Europe. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 26(1), 145–165. Döring, H. and Manow, P. (2016). Parliaments and governments database (ParlGov): Information on parties, elections and cabinets in modern democracies. Development version. Duverger, M. (1951). Les parties politiques. Paris: Colin. English translation (1954). Political Parties. London: Methuen & Co. Enyedi, Z. (2016). Populist Polarization and Party System Institutionalization. Problems of Post-Communism. doi: 10.1080/10758216.2015.1113883 Fish, S. M. (2005). Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies. Journal of Democracy, 17, 5–20.

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Freire, A., Lisi, M., Andreadis, I., and Leite Viegas, J. M. (2014). Political Representation in Bailed-Out Southern Europe: Greece and Portugal Compared. South European Society and Politics, 19(4), 413–434. Goetz, K. H. (2014). A Question of Time: Responsive and Responsible Democratic Politics. West European Politics, 37(2), 379–399. Griffith, J. and Leston-Bandeira, C. (2012). How Are Parliaments Using New Media to Engage with Citizens? The Journal of Legislative Studies, 18(3–4), 496–513. Grotz, F. and Weber, T. (2016). New Parties, Information Uncertainty, and Government Formation: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe. European Political Science Review, 8(3), 449–472. Helms, L. (2008). Studying Parliamentary Opposition in Old and New Democracies: Issues and Perspectives. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 14(1–2), 6–19. Hooghe, L., Marks, G., and Wilson, C. (2004). Does Left/Right Structure Party Positions on European Integration? In G. Marks and M. Steenbergen (Eds.) European Integration and Political Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 120–140. King, A. (1976). Modes of Executive Legislative Relations: Great Britain, France and West Germany. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 1(1), 11–36. Kriesi, H. (2014). The Populist Challenge. West European Politics, 37(2), 361–378. Laffan, B. (2014). Testing Times: The Growing Primacy of Responsibility in the Euro Area. West European Politics, 37(2), 270–287. Lengyel, G. and Göncz, B. (2016). Changing Attitudes of Hungarian Political Elites towards the EU (2007–2014). In L. Vogel and J. R. Teruel (Eds.) National Elites and the Crisis of European Integration: Country Studies 2007–2014. Special Issue of Historical Social Research, 41(4), 106–128. Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Louwerse, T., Otjes, S., Willumsen, D. M., and Öhberg, P. (2016). Reaching across the Aisle: Explaining Government-Opposition Voting in Parliament. Party Politics, advanced online publication. doi: 10.1177/1354068815626000 Maatsch, A. (2016). Drivers of Political Parties’ Voting Behaviour in European Economic Governance: The Ultimate Decline of the Economic Cleavage? West European Politics, advanced online publication. doi: 10.1080/01402382.2015.1129491 Mair, P. (1997). Party System Change: Approaches and Interpretations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mair, P. (2011). Bini Smaghi vs. the parties: Representative government and institutional constraints. Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and EU Democracy Observatory, EUI Working Paper No. 2011/22, European University Institute, Florence. Manow, P. and Burkhart, S. (2007). Legislative Self-Restraint under Divided Government in Germany, 1976–2002. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 32(2), 167–191. Millard, F. (2000). Presidents and Democratization in Poland: The Roles of Lech Waļesa and Aleksander Kwaśniewski in Building a New Polity. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 16, 39–62. Minkenberg, M. (2013). From Pariah to Policy-Maker? The Radical Right in Europe, West and East: Between Margin and Mainstream. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 21(1), 5–24. Moury, C. and De Giorgi, E. (2015). Introduction: Conflict and Consensus in Parliament during the Economic Crisis. Journal of Legislative Studies, 21(1), 1–13. Mudde, C. (2007). Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Taggart, P. (1998). A Touchstone of Dissent: Euroscepticism in Contemporary Western European Party Systems. European Journal of Political Research, 33(3), 363–388. Von Beyme, K. (1987). Parliamentary Oppositions in Europe. In E. Kolinsky (Ed.) Opposition in Western Europe. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 31–51. Winzen, T. (2017). Constitutional Preferences and Parliamentary Reform: Explaining National Parliaments’ Adaptation to European Integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2

Denmark Strengthened opposition, yet high levels of cooperation Flemming Juul Christiansen

Introduction Opposition parties are prominent in Danish parliamentary politics. This is due to the high frequency of minority governments that need external support to remain in office and pass legislative initiatives. As a small open economy, integrated into the European Union, Denmark is also affected by the driving forces that appear to have spurred populist opposition in most of the Western world. Denmark was strongly affected by the global financial crisis (GFC) that set on with the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The country experienced a historical 5 per cent drop in GDP in 2009 and recession the following years (Andersen, 2012; Stubager et al., 2013). After initial expansionary economic measures, politics of austerity and labour-market and pension reforms followed to stabilise the economy and comply with the fiscal limits set by the European Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and the ‘sixpack’. Both the centre-right government in office until 2011 and the centre-left government in office between 2011 and 2015 introduced such policies that were likely to be unpopular with the voters. This could increase support for non-mainstream opposition parties, and perhaps also radicalise their behaviour in order to mobilise public discontent. The mainstream opposition parties had more mixed motives. They could have gladly criticised the government but they also knew that they would need to deal with the economic problems and EU demands should they get back in office. During the economic hardships, Danish governments, like governments elsewhere, have argued that the unpopular policies were necessary because of the SGP. This link between EU and unpopular economic measures may give rise to scepticism towards the European Union (EU). Scepticism towards the EU is not a new phenomenon. Governments in Denmark have lost EU-related referenda three times between 1992 and 2015. In parliament, scepticism is confined to the opposition benches on both the left and the right. Nevertheless, the recent developments may have strengthened or radicalised the opposition parties critical towards the EU.

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Flemming Juul Christiansen

We should generally expect the GFC, the EU, and the policies associated with those to affect the composition and behaviour of Danish opposition parties. First, it should affect the composition of opposition parties by weakening the electoral support and parliamentary strength of mainstream parties, and thus also the mainstream opposition parties, while it increases the number and strengthens electoral support of the permanent opposition parties characterised by populist and anti-EU positions. Second, there should be an effect on the behaviour of the opposition parties depending on whether they are mainstream or permanent. Generally, the latter should become more adversarial. This means less likely to cooperate with the government on passing legislation, and more inclined to focus on initiating its own bills or on parliamentary scrutiny type of questions or interpellations. For the mainstream parties there may be different effects in the short and long run. In the short run, the traditional economic cleavage between mainstream parties should be activated by the GFC. However, in the long run the SGP policies of the EU would make them more compliant. Hence, the Danish case offers the possibility to study the impact of the GFC and other recent developments on permanent and mainstream opposition parties in a minority government setting. The rest of this section takes up the composition of the opposition. Denmark is a multiparty system. At the 2015 election, nine parties got elected to parliament (see Table 2.1). Four of them are old parties established together with universal suffrage. They have often held office. The other five are new(er) parties, out of which only two have until now held office for brief periods. Hence, the others remain permanent opposition parties. The Social Democrats (Socialdemokratiet) and the Social Liberals (Radikale Venstre or RV) are the old mainstream parties of the centre-left. The Conservative People’s Party (Konservative Folkeparti or KF) and Liberals (Venstre) are the mainstream parties of the centre-right. Every government for over a century has been formed by at least one of these four parties. When not in office, they would be temporary or mainstream opposition (Ilonszki and De Giorgi in the introduction). In accordance with the cleavage theory, the four old parties were formed to represent traditional occupational sectors of society, and they are divided over economic issues (Elklit, 1984; cf. Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). Danish legislative politics is very open towards ‘innovation’ in the party system (Bischoff and Christiansen, 2017). This is due to proportional representation and a comparatively low electoral threshold of 2 per cent. So, the electoral system makes it easy for new parties to win seats. Most prominently, the party system changed its dynamic at the “Earthquake election” in 1973 when the number of parties doubled from five to ten (Pedersen, 1987; Bille, 1989). Many of the new parties have taken up non-economic issues such as environment and immigration and may represent a new authoritarian-libertarian dimension rather than the traditional economic left-right divide (Stubager, 2013).

Venstre – Danmarks liberale parti Socialdemokratiet Radikale Venstre

V

Enhedslisten – De RødGrønne Dansk Folkeparti

Liberal Alliance

Alternativet

EL

DF

LA*

ALT

The Alter-native

Liberal Alliance

Danish People’s Party

Red-Green Alliance

Venstre – The Liberal Party of Denmark Social Democratic Party Danish Social Liberal Party Conservative People’s Party Socialist People’s Party

English name

* Named Ny Alliance (New Alliance) until 2009.

SF

Det Konservative Folkeparti Socialistisk Folkeparti

KF

S RV

National language name

Name abbreviation

Table 2.1 Political parties in the Danish parliament (2005–2016)

1998

1994

1960

1915

1884 1905

1870/1910

First entry into parliament

Green

2015

(Economic) liberal 2007

Left socialist/ Communist Ethno-nationalist

Left socialist

Social democratic (Centrist/social) liberal Conservative

Agrarian/ liberal

Party family

4.8

2.8–7.5

12.3–21.1

2.2–7.8

4.2–13.0

3.2–10.4

24.8–26.3 4.6–9.5

19.0–29.0

Party stability (electoral support range)

Never in government (until 2016) Never in government

Never in government

In and out of government (only 2011–2014) Never in government

In and out of government

In and out of government In and out of government

In and out of government

Experience in government

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Flemming Juul Christiansen

There are five new parties. Formed in 1960, the Socialist People’s Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti or SF) is not so young any longer. Between 2011 and 2014 it took part in a government for the first time. Further to the left is found the Red Green Alliance (Enhedslisten de rød-grønne or EL), a merger of Communists and other groups on the left wing. At the 2015 election, a new party got elected on the left wing, The Alternative (Alternativet or ALT), formed by a former Social Liberal Minister of Culture, on a quest to ‘renew the political process and dialogue’. EL has never considered itself ready to take office, and neither did ALT at the 2015 election. Hence, both parties are to be considered permanent opposition parties, something SF also used to be until 2011, and now perhaps is again for some time to come. To the right of Liberals and Conservatives is found the Liberal Alliance (Liberal Alliance or LA) and the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti or DF), the latter usually labelled radical or populist right in the literature due to its stances on immigrants and the EU but with more centrist or even centre-left socio-economic positions (Christiansen, 2016). The current leader of DF consistently rejects government participation, also after the 2015 election result, when his party got even more votes than Venstre, which ended up forming the government (ibid.). LA wanted to join the government after the 2015 election. When Venstre opted for a single party minority government, LA remained in opposition until a government enlargement in late 2016. Between the elections in 2005 and 2015, the composition of the opposition changed with two new parties: LA and ALT. It increased the number of parties from 7 to 9. Both parties could be viewed as a challenge to the status quo of the established parties. During the same period the four old parties reduced their shares from 74 per cent to 54 per cent, the gross volatility steadily increased from 26 to 42 per cent of the voters, and there were more late deciders (Hansen and Stubager, 2017, 35). One exception has been Socialdemokratiet, which has been able to maintain its support although at a level much lower than historically. Hence, there was an increase in the support for vocal opposition parties without office experience and sceptical towards the EU, on the latter point with the partial exception of ALT. SF was punished by the voters for its government participation. Compared with one decade ago there are now more opposition parties not aiming for office, and their vote share has increased significantly. These observations on the development in the composition of the opposition are in accordance with the expectation that the permanent opposition would be strengthened by the GFC. The next two sections analyse the support for government bills by opposition parties as well as their efforts in the parliamentary scrutiny activity. This is followed by a discussion of the impact on the behaviour of Danish opposition parties that operate under minority government and an attempt to characterise Danish opposition in theoretical terms.

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The opposition’s behaviour in the law-making process The six governments in office between 2005 and 2016 are listed in Table 2.2. Five of them were minority coalitions composed of two or three parties, while the 2015–2016 government was formed by a single party. Its share of only 19 per cent of the seats was unusual and half the level of most previous minority governments at about 40 per cent of the seats. Opposition support for government’s bills is a widely used indicator for executive-legislative cooperation (or conflict). Danish MPs can vote ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘neither yes nor no’, i.e. abstain. Bills are passed into law by simple majority, i.e. when there are more ‘yes’ than ‘no’ votes, while abstentions are neither added to ‘yes’ nor to ‘no’ but do count to reach the constitutional quorum of 90 votes out of the 179 members of the parliament. Party cohesion is very strong, so that it makes sense to code how legislative parties vote as groups (Skjæveland, 2001). In the rare cases when party group members have not voted the same, the vote of the party has been coded according to how most of its members voted. The dataset presented contains bills for the legislative terms between 2005 and 2016 (2005–2007; 2007–2011; 2011–2015; 2015‒).1 This corresponds to the period after the 2008 GFC, but also covers a preceding legislative period, 2005–2007, and the 2015 election, which could help us to capture long-term effects. It contains votes from each party on all 2,418 government bills voted upon during the period under analysis, of which only 3 were defeated.

Table 2.2 Government and opposition composition (2005–2016) Prime Minister (PM’s party)

Type of government

Government parties

Opposition parties

2005–2007

Fogh Rasmussen (V)

V, KF

2007–2009*

Fogh Rasmussen (V)

2009–2011

Løkke Rasmussen (V)

2011–2014**

Thorning-Schmidt (S)

2014–2015

Thorning-Schmidt (S)

2015–2016***

Løkke Rasmussen (V)

Minority Coalition Minority Coalition Minority Coalition Minority Coalition Minority Coalition Single Party Minority

S, DF, RV, SF, EL S, DF, RV, SF, LA, EL S, DF, RV, SF, LA, EL V, DF, EL, LA, KF V, DF, SF, EL, LA, KF S, DF, LA, EL, ALT, RV, SF, KF

V, KF V, KF S, RV, SF S, RV V

* No election, as Fogh Rasmussen resigned to become General Secretary of NATO. ** No election, as SF resigned from government due to internal disputes over government policy. *** No election; in 2016 the government as minority was simply enlarged with LA and KF.

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Flemming Juul Christiansen

Table 2.3 Percentage of favourable votes for government bills by all parties, per government (2005–2016) Fogh Fogh Løkke Thorning- ThorningLøkke Rasmussen I Rasmussen II Rasmussen I Schmidt I Schmidt II Rasmussen II (2005–2007) (2007–2009) (2009–2011) (2011–2014) (2014–2015) (2015–2016) V S RV KF SF DF EL LA ALT

99.8 80.8 78.6 99.8 63.5 94.9 40.9 NA NA

100 83.9 86.6 100 75.8 93.5 54.3 91.9 NA

99.8 77.9 75.1 99.8 73.7 95.6 50.5 82.6 NA

81.1 100 100 81.1 100 73.4 81.1 71.5 NA

85.8 100 100 85.1 97.3 78.7 74.3 65.9 NA

100 87.0 77.2 97.9 69.4 92.2 49.7 83.9 68.9

Note: Parties in government in bold.

Table 2.3 contains the percentage of favourable votes2 to government bills for each party in parliament during the six governments under analysis. In the 2005 election, the centre-right minority government of Venstre and KF once again won a majority together with DF, which had been a support party for the government since it won the 2001 election (Bille, 2014, 60). This cooperation implied that the party accepted most economic policies and other policies presented in the coalition agreement of the government in return for concession on other topics of high saliency to the parties, especially concerning immigration policies, crime and initiatives for elderly citizens (Christiansen and Pedersen, 2014). The most important policies were agreed on by the government and DF in advance, with matters about the European Union as a major exception. With DF having as a declared goal to become recognised as a ‘normal’ party, it sought to achieve this by showing loyal support towards a centre-right government and not trying to topple it (Christiansen, 2016).3 Table 2.3 shows DF in the role of support party voting yes to 95 per cent of the government bills, a much higher share than for any of the opposition parties to the left of the government.4 The two mainstream opposition parties to the left supported about 80 per cent of the government bills. This level of support for government bills is in accordance with historical observations of ‘the old parties’ and their renowned ‘constructive opposition’ (Pedersen, 1967; Kurrild-Klitgaard et al., 2006). The share was somewhat lower for the more leftist SF, whereas the extreme leftist EL supported only 41 per cent of the bills from the government. At the 2007 election, the minority government of Venstre and KF won a majority once more, together with its support party, DF; a narrow one of just one seat (Kosiara-Pedersen, 2008). The cooperation between the three parties continued. Furthermore, the government also got support from the party New

Denmark 23

Alliance, which had entered the parliament for the first time (and in 2009 it changed its name to LA – Liberal Alliance). This party supported more than nine out of ten government bills. All parties became more positive towards the government bills compared with the 2005–2007 period. This may indicate a less controversial agenda by the government, now in its third term. It was with a prospering economy and a spirit of optimism when the finance ministers delivered their state budget bills (e.g. Bille, 2014, 105). The slight decline in support from DF (from 94.9 to 93.5 per cent) could indicate slightly more cordial relations with the opposition to the left on topics disliked by DF, such as the EU and immigration. In particular, SF became more positive towards the government (supporting 75.8 per cent compared with 63.5 per cent in 2005–2007). SF approached Socialdemokratiet as part of establishing a ‘preelectoral coalition’ (see Christiansen et al., 2014). The GFC crisis hit the world at the end of 2008, and in the time thereafter it began slowly to show its effects, also in Denmark. After rumours for months, the PM, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, became General Secretary of NATO in April 2009 and left the seat of PM to the Minister of Finance, Lars Løkke Rasmussen (no kin). This did not in any manner change the parliamentary situation: there was no general election and the minority government remained in office supported by DF and LA. However, at about the same time, the effects of the GFC began to be realised: GDP fell and bank packages and other economic measures were introduced to deal with the immediate crisis. Hence, the economic situation and political problems ahead suddenly looked a world apart for Løkke Rasmussen from those of his predecessor.5 Because the two parts of the electoral term 2007–2011 are so parliamentarily alike but politically different, they may be indicators of the immediate effect of the GFC. Support from DF increased to 95.6 per cent, showing that the government now had to rely even more on its support party to secure majorities. However, for all of the other parties, a decline was observed in their support for government bills. It could indicate a negative reaction towards the more unpopular measures made by the government to come out of the crisis in the long run. It included reduction of the maximum payment of unemployment benefit from four to two years. A widely used and popular early retirement scheme was largely dismantled. These were policies Socialdemokratiet did not support. The mainstream opposition did become less supportive towards the government bills in 2009–11, as compared with 2007–2009. However, its level of support remained at a higher level than the opposition further to the left. At the 2011 election, the minority government of Venstre and KF, supported by DF – a constellation in power for almost ten years – was defeated. The major theme of the election was the economic crisis (Stubager et al., 2013). It was replaced by a three-party minority centre-left government of Socialdemokratiet, RV, and SF, headed by Helle Thorning-Schmidt (S). She was also appointed PM with the support of EL, although this party did not

24

Flemming Juul Christiansen

get as closely integrated in the decision-making process as had DF with the previous government. One important reason was that the new government in its coalition agreement accepted a demand by RV to continue the economic policies of the Venstre-KF government. Looking at the support for the bills of the government, the support level of EL – the permanent opposition to the left of the government – was at about the same level as that of Venstre and KF, the mainstream opposition parties that seemed reasonably satisfied with the government bills, with support at the historical level for ‘constructive opposition’ of about 80 per cent. DF and LA were at a slightly lower level but much higher than that of EL before the 2011 election. Hence, at this point, a few years after the GFC, opposition in the Danish parliament to government bills was not very pronounced. The policies of the government were considered too rightist by many members of SF, resulting in internal protests with the effect that SF withdrew from government in February 2014. Thereby, the party joined the opposition but still recognised its responsibility to uphold what it had agreed to as part of the government. Its support for the government bills of 2014–2015 was very high (97.3 per cent). During this period, the support of mainstream opposition parties to the right increased to 85 per cent, and the support of DF also increased, whereas that of EL, despite its being part of the parliamentary basis of the government, fell to 74 per cent, significantly less than that of the right-wing opposition (with the exception of LA at 66 per cent). This indicates a move to the right by the government after SF had left it.6 The single party Venstre minority government formed after the 2015 election by Lars Løkke Rasmussen faced eight opposition parties in parliaments from all camps. In the ‘blue bloc’, the traditional mainstream KF supported most government initiatives (97.9 per cent). DF also supported many government initiatives, although at a slightly lower level than during the era from 2001 to 2011 (92.2 per cent). Support from LA was at a somewhat lower level (83.9). Socialdemokratiet supported government bills at historically high levels, even for a mainstream opposition party (87.0 per cent). Stricter immigration policies of the party compared with the years in government cooperation may explain this, along with the difference from the otherwise centrist and mainstream RV (support level 77.2). The parties further to the left supported government bills at lower levels, SF and ALT slightly below 70 per cent, and EL even below 50 per cent. These levels of support somewhat resemble the 2005–2007 period, although at slightly higher levels. The direct short-term effect of the GFC was a reduced support for government bills from the opposition parties, mainstream or permanent. The support party of the government was the sole exception. However, in the long run, the mainstream parties, also in opposition, have increased rather than reduced their support for the governments. It provides support for the expectation that the short-term effects of the GFC increased the divide between the mainstream parties but that they approached each other in the longer run, perhaps adapting

Denmark 25

to the structural budget demands of the EU. Support from the permanent opposition remained at lower levels than those of mainstream opposition parties but indeed a bit above and not below compared with the time before the GFC. This does not provide confirmation for the expectation that permanent opposition should radicalise, except in the short term right after the crisis. In particular, when a permanent opposition party, like DF until 2011, got closely integrated into the decision-making process, it became more moderate.

The opposition actors beyond voting behaviour Parliamentary opposition parties react not only to government bills. They also act by proposing their own bills, or they scrutinise the government through questions or interpellations. Any Danish MP, alone or together with other co-sponsors, could propose a ‘private bill’. They are rare though. Between 2005 and 2016, there were 88 compared with the 2,418 from the government, making up 3.5 per cent of all bills. Thirteen private bills originated from the Speaker and Rules Committee jointly, in every case including at least one government party member, and they all passed. Only 6 other private bills passed. Table 2.4 contains number of private bills for each government omitting those of the Rules Committee, since these cannot be labelled oppositional activities. Some of the remaining 75 bills, or about 7 per year, had sponsors from more than one party group. In Table 2.4 is registered on an annual basis7 from which of the parties private bills originate. When there were co-sponsors from more than one party, each party has been counted. We observe that no party has ever proposed more than one bill for each of its MPs each year. Members of government parties have not proposed bills, so all private bills are from opposition parties. During the years of government by Venstre and KF until 2011, the private bills came primarily from the permanent opposition of the left wing. The likelihood of a bill proposed by an MP from permanent opposition parties is higher than from those of mainstream opposition parties, with the exception of RV 2007–2009. However, the development does not provide support for the expectation that the GFC would increase the number of bills from the permanent opposition. Opposition parties in Denmark are the most frequent users of various forms of parliamentary scrutiny. It involves questions, interpellations, calling the minister into council, etc. Hereby, they can raise attention to topics and criticise the government. Empirical studies show, both with outset in the Danish case and more generally, that a democratic opposition has the upper hand in setting the public agenda through its criticism of the government (GreenPedersen, 2010; Green-Pedersen and Mortensen, 2010; Seeberg, 2013). Hence, the power to criticise remains one of the most important tools of an opposition, also in Denmark despite the opportunities to seek policy influence through compromises and legislative committees.

0 (0) 13 (0.10) 5 (0.12) 0 (0) 14 (0.49) 6 (0.36) 7 (0.11) NA

0

0 (0) 3 (0.05) 6 (0.48) 0 (0) 5 (0.12) 0 (0) 4 (0.10) 1 (0.14) NA

2

0 (0) 2 (0.0) 2 (0.08) 0 (0) 3 (0.05) 0 (0) 1 (0.01) 0 (0) NA 0

1 (0.0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1 (0.05) 0 (0) 4 (0.14) 4 (0.07) 1 (0.04) NA 0

1 (0.0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1 (0.12) 1 (0.05) 2 (0.11) 3 (0.09) 1 (0.07) NA

ThorningSchmidt II (2014– 2015) 0 (0) 2 (0.03) 1 (0.10) 0 (0) 5 (0.56) 2 (0.11) 4 (0.09) 0 (0) 2 (0.09) 0

Rasmussen L. II (2015– 2016)

79

NA

177 (1.2) 4616 (36) 1253 (27) 23 (0.5) 2713 (89) 5549 (335) 3425 (52) NA

41

7 (0.1) 1973 (31) 138 (11) 0 (0) 785 (24) 1931 (346) 978 (28) 22 (3.2) NA

Rasmussen F. II (2007– 2009)

102

39 (0.3) 2097 (19) 271 (12) 10 (0.2) 896 (16) 1248 (128) 536 (8.8) 56 (11.4) NA

Rasmussen L. I (2009– 2011)

43

4975 (41) 8 (0.1) 1 (0.0) 341 (18) 0 (0) 1232 (44) 1976 (38) 208 (9.9) NA

ThorningSchmidt I (2011– 2014)

23

780 (12) 1 (0.0) 0 (0) 63 (5.7) 113 (6.8) 159 (9.6) 270 (8.9) 30 (2.4) NA

ThorningSchmidt II (2014– 2015)

9 (0.2) 710 (12) 29 (2.9) 66 (8.7) 165 (18.6) 180 (10.1) 334 (7.1) 36 (2.2) 114 (10) 34

Rasmussen L. II (2015– 2016)

Notes: PPG = parliamentary party group. Government parties in bold. All bills or questions through the term. Bills initiated by the Speaker and the Rules Committee not included. Activities with sponsors from more parties calculated as one initiative per party. The entire 2008/09 parliamentary year counted to the 2007–2009 government, and the entire 2013–14 parliamentary year to the 2011–2014 government, with the exception of SF, whose questions in that session were all posed during the 2014–2015 government, i.e. after the party had left the government. All bills or questions for the electoral term but at an annual basis in brackets, see footnote 6. OTH are ‘others’ and includes four North Atlantic Seats and various MPs who have abandoned the party group they were elected for without joining another (independent or non-inscrits). Since the latter number varies, it has not been calculated per MP. Founders of LA and ALT represented their party in parliament prior to the party winning seats.

OTH 0

ALT NA

LA

DF

EL

SF

KF

RV

S

V

ThorningSchmidt I (2011– 2014)

Rasmussen F. I (2005– 2007)

Rasmussen L. I (2009– 2011)

Rasmussen F. I (2005– 2007)

Rasmussen F. II (2007– 2009)

Number of parliamentary questions per PPG (§ 20) (per MP/year)

Number of initiated bills per PPG (per MP/year)

Table 2.4 Parliamentary activities of all parties, per government (2005–2016)

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Parliamentary scrutiny is operationalised in this chapter primarily as questions to the minister in parliament (the so-called Section 20 questions referring to a section [§] in the parliamentary order that allows the MP to pose them). They have been calculated by the author from figures found on the homepage of the Danish Parliament. Any member could pose a question. As part of a broader reform of the legislative procedures, approved by parliament in 2007 (B 167), only questions concerning the opinions of the ministers to a public matter should thereafter be put forward using Section 20, whereas factual questions should go through the legislative committees. The annual number of Section 20 questions had increased for decades from less than 100 during the 1950s to above 1,000 during the 1980s to more than 7,000 in the 2005/2006 parliamentary term. After the change in procedure, the number has declined to about 1,500 in the 2015–16 parliamentary term. This steep decline resembles a rise of about the same number of committee questions. Hence, we should not conclude too much from it about decline in opposition activity. The Section 20 questions remain usable to say something about which opposition parties are most active. Only a tiny share, 1 to 2 per cent, of the Section 20 questions originate from government parties, so questions are primarily oppositional activity. We see from Table 2.4 that, for the 2005–07 government, the support party, DF, which is also in this chapter considered to be a permanent opposition party, did not refrain from asking questions. With 52 questions per member per year on average, they were even more ‘curious’ than the MPs from the mainstream opposition parties of Socialdemokratiet and RV. The parties further to the left were also very active asking questions, with SF at 89 and EL at no less than 335 questions per MP per year. Hence, mainstream opposition parties asked fewer questions per MP than the permanent opposition parties. However, the support party did it less than those permanent opposition parties found on the opposite ideological wing. For the 2007–09 government, with pretty similar parliamentary conditions to the previous government, the patterns of Section 20 questions were also the same but at a somewhat lower level due to the procedural change with more committee questions. SF though reduced its annual number of questions per member from 89 to 24. This level resembled that of Socialdemokratiet, which it tried to emulate to become ‘koalitionsfähig’ (Christiansen et al., 2014). Also DF and RV became less prone to ask questions, and were now at the same level or below that of Socialdemokratiet. For the 2009–11 government, hit by the GFC, the same pattern of question activity largely continues. EL remains most eager to ask questions, then followed the mainstream opposition party Socialdemokratiet at a much lower level, seconded by SF. DF was now at an even lower level. This is an indication that during the crisis the minority government needed to integrate its support party even further, and it responded with fewer questions that could trouble the government ministers.

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After the 2011 election, with a centre-left government in office, roles changed. EL now questioned much less than during the centre-right government but it still asked many questions. Venstre became the leading mainstream opposition party, as well as the one to ask the highest number of questions, even when counted for each MP, above DF. This is contrary to the expectation that permanent opposition parties ask more questions, but it could be explained by the other expectation that mainstream parties are likely in the short run to oppose the government during an economic crisis. Indeed, that was the case. Between 2005 and 2007 the share of questions on economic topics8 was 36 per cent. Over the following years, there was a higher share of economic questions. Between 2011 and 2014, 57 per cent of the questions focused on economic issues. Then a huge decline followed. For the 2014–2015 government, the level was back to 36 per cent, and in 2015–16 it declined even further to 19 per cent. The big fluctuations indicate changes in the economic conditions, and in the focus of the opposition. It also indicates that the GFC caused increased opposition attention to economic matters. During the 2014–2015 government, Venstre and EL were both more ‘calm’, although V still asked the most questions per MP. After the 2015 election, roles were reversed once more. SF and Socialdemokratiet asked the highest number of questions, and no longer EL. Yet, the parties forming the parliamentary basis for the Venstre government also asked some Section 20 questions. Generally, a shift is observed over the period, so that permanent opposition parties pose fewer questions, whereas the decline for mainstream opposition parties appears less pronounced. Unfortunately, the pattern in the more numerous committee questions is hard to follow as closely as the Section 20 questions, since they are not summed up at party level by parliament and would require coding of each MP. The combined number of committee questions – which could concern either bills under consideration or ‘general matters’ – before the 2007 reform was at about 9,000 per year. It then rose rapidly to 16,000 in 2009–10 but has since then stabilised at about 13,000 to 14,000 questions, which is still at a higher level than prior to the reform. Even though we cannot differentiate these questions on parties, most of them originate from opposition parties. Furthermore, the surge in questions in 2009–10 could be a result of the GFC leading to more opposition activity at the time. Another opposition activity, often caused by or leading to public attention, is ‘calling the minister into council’ in the legislative committee. Most of these meetings are open to the public. This happened 666 times in the 2005–2006 Session; it fell to 525 in 2007–08 prior to the crisis but then rose to a peak of 1,154 in 2009–10 right after the crisis. Since then the level has been lower. It was 891 in 2015–16, up from 603 in 2014–2015. This recent rise is probably related to the changed composition of the opposition after the election described in the previous section. Almost all of these meetings are called by

Denmark 29

members of the opposition. Thus, the rise after the GFC could be an indicator of increased oppositional activity at the time, and the somewhat higher level compared with the time before the GFC would indicate something of the same. The number of interpellations in the Danish parliament did not develop through the period under study. It ranged between 38 and 50 without a specific pattern. We can conclude that opposition scrutiny did appear to rise due to the immediate effects of the GFC but also – in the case of DF – that support for a minority government appeared to have a dampening effect.

Opposition during minority government Permanent Danish opposition parties still support government bills, and they do not initiate more bills or raise more questions, except for the immediate period right after the GFC. Why didn’t they become more radical? Above, it was occasionally observed that permanent opposition parties were needed by the government for support, since it was in minority. This type of government is particularly frequent in Denmark. Except for one government in 1993–94, every Danish government since 1971 has been of the minority type. Hence, some of the permanent opposition parties actually support the government, at least to stay in office, as well as some but usually not all of its legislative measures (cf. Bale and Bergman, 2006). Along with other Nordic and Scandinavian countries, Denmark is often seen as a ‘consensual democracy’ with high degrees of cooperation with the opposition (Arter, 2006; Christiansen and Damgaard, 2008). Danish minority governments create majorities through policy agreements with parts of the opposition, to affect the behaviour of opposition parties (Christiansen and Pedersen, 2014). In legislative agreements government and opposition bind themselves to a number of policies for a certain period of time, a system developed and upheld over time by informal parliamentary norms (ibid.). If permanent opposition parties carry greater weight, the minority governments of Denmark also become more dependent on them, and make more agreements. On the one hand, legislative agreements offer policy influence to opposition parties without their needing to take office – something that would appear attractive for a ‘semi-responsible’ opposition party. Yet, it also requires compliance to follow parliamentary norms, in particular to support and uphold policy compromises in parliament and in public (ibid.). That kind of legislative behaviour would not characterise a proper anti-system party (Sartori, 1976). The incentive and need for minority governments to include permanent opposition parties may dampen the adversarial behaviour of the latter, in particular for those permanent opposition parties that act as a parliamentary basis for a government. That was what we could observe empirically. This means that the distinction identified by Mair (2011, 14) between responsible parties aiming for office and ‘semi-responsible’ parties not aiming

30

Flemming Juul Christiansen

for office, yet still policy seeking (and not ‘anti-system’), is highly relevant for Danish politics where similar observations have a long history (Bille, 1989; Green-Pedersen, 2001). It still rings a bell what Pedersen (1967) stated about Denmark – agreeing with Dahl (1966, 34) about the American case: “To say where the ‘government’ leaves off and the ‘opposition’ begins is an exercise in metaphysics.” However, we may use another time-honoured observer of politics to go one step deeper into the ‘metaphysics’ of Danish opposition informed by the study of the impact of the GFC on opposition behaviour presented above. Kirchheimer (1957) identifies three forms of opposition – ‘classical’, ‘principled’ and ‘cartel’. They are all found in the Danish case, both historically and at present, and they are performed by different parties at different times. The ‘classical’ opposition – with British inspiration – is represented by the mainstream parties that await the opportunity the take power from the government. These parties utilised the vulnerability of the government in the short run after the GFC to criticise it and oppose its initiatives. However, in the long run, the same parties complied with the EU policies perceived as necessary for a ‘responsible party’ performing ‘constructive opposition’ ready to take part in compromises for the best of the country. As such they would become more of a ‘cartelised’ opposition. The permanent opposition parties represent the principled opposition, i.e. parties that refrain from taking office without gaining full power. Nevertheless, due to policy agreements with the minority governments, these parties are also ‘cartelised’ into the political process, and do not remain as principled as supposed in Kirchheimer’s three models. This is particularly the case if such a party also supports the government to stay in office. So, as described, all of the Danish opposition parties are at times part of ‘cartel opposition’ but not as suggested in the model through the almost elimination of opposition like the grand coalition of Austria in the post-war years, or like in the consociational models described by Lijphart (1968); empirical patterns that worried Kirchheimer (1957). What comes closest to cartel opposition would be the role of the DF as a permanent support party for the minority government between 2001 and 2011. Previously, there have also been Danish opposition parties with principled anti-system traits (Bille, 1989). If we study Danish opposition parties and their interactions with each other and with government in ‘blocs’ we find that they also combine ‘classical’ and ‘cartel’ opposition. This is so because every party in most cases identifies with a bloc of parties united that the government should originate from it (Green-Pedersen and Thomsen, 2005). Each bloc consists of mainstream and non-mainstream elements, i.e. that some of the parties have office aspirations, and others do not (cf. Ilonszki and De Giorgi in the introduction). The blocs are quite stable; only RV has shifted side occasionally but most recently back in 1993. One or usually more than one mainstream party within the winning bloc forms a minority government. The permanent opposition parties within the bloc then support the government’s staying in office, i.e. they form a

Denmark 31

parliamentary basis for the government, and support smaller and larger parts of its legislative initiatives.

Conclusions Parliamentary opposition in the small and usually affluent and peaceful country of Denmark has changed its format after the GFC, which hit the country particularly hard. Permanent opposition parties win an increasing share of the votes. New parties offering alternative solutions to the societal model offered by the existing parties and the EU have entered the stage. Generally, permanent opposition parties in Denmark show more dissent with government bills, and they also used to ask more questions than mainstream opposition parties did. Opposition party behaviour was affected by the GFC in the short term but much less in the long run. The first effect of the GFC was for all opposition parties to become more critical towards the government and its proposed bills. There was also more parliamentary scrutiny and questions particularly concerned with economics. Later on, however, the mainstream parties approached each other with less dissent than previously, even for ‘constructive’ opposition parties. This could be due to their acceptance and need to meet the fiscal limits set up by the EU. The prevalence of minority government means that some of the permanent opposition parties in Denmark support the cabinet in office. These parties show much less dissent when passing the bills, although they may still pose a number of questions. Apparently, minority governments make it possible for permanent opposition parties not to become ‘anti-system’, as suggested by Sartori (1976), but rather ‘semi-responsible’, as suggested by Mair (2011), or to combine ‘principled’ and ‘cartelised’ opposition, in the terms of Kirchheimer (1957). They may not take government office but they do take part in policy compromises and negotiated agreements that require norm abidance and credible commitment. So, in lieu of the GFC with economic hardship, austerity politics, and welfare reforms, the traditional mainstream opposition parties have weakened, and more radical or populist parties, sceptical towards the EU, without or with less ambition to govern, have strengthened. The voters have called for new alternatives. Nevertheless, we cannot observe radicalisation of the behaviour of such parties in parliament. The Danish case provides examples similar to much of the rest of the Western world of increased support for populist and EU sceptical traits. Yet, it also shows that mainstream parties and permanent opposition parties are often able to cooperate and find solutions. There is room for concern, though. The present situation could make it too attractive for opposition parties to remain on the sidelines because they are offered some influence nevertheless. This system has worked until now under conditions where the mainstream parties have still firmly held on to office. Now, they have become increasingly challenged

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and vulnerable to attack when they have to defend (hard) policies. Someday in the future, the mainstream parties of today might lose their majority. Will the permanent opposition parties of today then be persuaded to take office after all and stick to norms of compromise? Otherwise, it may weaken the decisionmaking ability of the Danish political system.

Notes 1 Data has been collected primarily by the author from the parliamentary homepage www. ft.dk – with help of student assistants for selected parts and also a few parts from the Agenda Setting Dataset collected for Denmark by Christoffer Green-Pedersen (cf. Christiansen et al., 2014). For the government 2015–2016, only its two first sessions 2014–15 II and 2015–16 are included but not the ongoing 2016–17 session. 2 This approach is selected because it is very simple to understand. An alternative, and perhaps slightly more valid, approach would be to calculate the ‘neither yes nor no’ as 0.5 support and sum it up as Pedersen (1967) suggested. The author has done this. It gives only slightly higher figures than in Table 2.3, since most parties do vote yes or no to most proposals. It does not change the overall patterns between parties or over time. 3 DF was founded in 1995 by a leading member of the Progress Party (Fremskridtspartiet), which won seats in parliament between 1973 and 1998. This party did topple or prevent the formation of centre-right government on a number of occasions, and was considered more or less unruly and unreliable as a bargaining partner (Bille, 1989). 4 The government parties did actually not support one of the government bills during this term, and again in 2009–2011. Therefore, the shares are 99.8 and not 100. This is not an error in the data set, as one would perhaps first suspect. The two proposals had an ethical content with MPs released from the whip. They were amended by parliament through the readings and ended being passed in forms that majorities of the parliamentary groups of the government parties could no longer accept. 5 It is unlikely that the policy changes were due to a new PM. The change was not politically motivated, and there were no statements or observations made at the time hinting in that direction. The new PM had held senior positions in the government and the party leadership for many years. 6 Part of the internal debate in SF was whether government participation impacted government policies or not compared with joining the opposition. The results here would indicate that SF did slightly prevent their partners from moving more to the right than they already did. 7 For this purpose, the number of days in office for each cabinet is calculated, and then divided by 365: 2005–2007: 1008; 2007–2009: 509; 2009–2011: 893; 2011–2014: 854; 2014–2015: 505. The government from 2015 to 2016 was in office for 519 days but only 463 days are counted, since the current 2016–2017 session has not been coded. 8 Operationalised as questions to the ministers of Finance, Economy, Tax, Trade and Labour.

References Andersen, J.G., 2012. Velfærd under opbrud? Frederiksberg: Dansk Magisterforening. Arter, D., 2006. Democracy in Scandinavia: Consensual, Majoritarian or Mixed? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bale, T. and Bergman, T.B., 2006. Captives No Longer, but Servants Still? Contract Parliamentarism and the New Minority Governance in Sweden and New Zealand. Government and Opposition, 41 (3) pp. 422–449.

Denmark 33 Bille, L., 1989. Denmark: The Oscillating Party System. West European Politics, 12 (4) pp. 42–58. Bille, L., 2014. Blå, rød eller . . .? Copenhagen: Djøf/Jurist-og Økonomforbundet. Bischoff, C. and Christiansen, F.J., 2017. Political Parties and Innovation. Public Management Review, 19 (1) pp. 74–89. Christiansen, F.J., 2016. The Danish People’s Party: Combining Cooperation and Radical Positions. In: T. Akkerman, S.L. de lange and M. Rooduijn, eds. Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe. London: Routledge. pp. 94–112. Christiansen, F.J. and Damgaard, E., 2008. Parliamentary Opposition under Minority Parliamentarism: Scandinavia. Journal of Legislative Studies, 14 (1–2) pp. 46–76. Christiansen, F.J., Nielsen, R.L., and Pedersen, R.B., 2014. Friendship, Courting, and Engagement: Pre-Electoral Coalition Dynamics in Action. Journal of Legislative Studies, 20 (4) pp. 413–429. Christiansen, F.J. and Pedersen, H.H., 2014. Minority Coalition Governance in Denmark. Party Politics, 20 (6) pp. 940–949. Dahl, R.A., 1966. Political Oppositions in Western Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elklit, J., 1984. Det klassiske danske partisystem bliver til. In: J. Elklit and O. Tonsgaard, eds. Valg og vælgeradfærd: Studier i dansk politik.Århus: Politica. pp. 21–38. Green-Pedersen, C., 2001. Minority Governments and Party Politics: The Political and Institutional Background to the ‘Danish Miracle’. Journal of Public Policy, 21 (1) pp. 53–70. Green-Pedersen, C., 2010. Bringing Parties into Parliament: The Development of Parliamentary Activities in Western Europe. Party Politics, 16 (3) pp. 347–369. Green-Pedersen, C. and Mortensen, P.B., 2010. Who Sets the Agenda and Who Responds to It in the Danish Parliament? A New Model of Issue Competition and AgendaSetting. European Journal of Political Research, 49 (2) pp. 257–281. Green-Pedersen, C. and Thomsen, L.H., 2005. Bloc Politics vs. Broad Cooperation? The Functioning of Danish Minority Parliamentarism. Journal of Legislative Studies, 11 (2) pp. 153–169. Hansen, K.H. and Stubager, R., 2017. Oprør fra udkanten, Folketingsvalget 2015. Copenhagen: Djøf/Jurist-og Økonomforbundet. Ilonszki, G. and De Giorgi, E., 2018. Introduction. In Opposition Parties in European Legislatures: Conflict or Consensus? London: Routledge. Kirchheimer, O., 1957. The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes. Social Research, 24 (2) pp. 127–156. Kosiara-Pedersen, K., 2008. The 2007 Danish General Election: Generating a Fragile Majority. West European Politics, 31 (5) pp. 1040–1048. Kurrild-Klitgaard, P., Klemmensen, R.T., and Hansen, M.E., 2006. Blokpolitik og ‘det samarbejdende folkestyres’ fire gamle partier, 1953–2005. Økonomi og Politik, 79 (1) pp. 79–85. Lijphart, A., 1968. The Politics of Accommodation in Segmented Societies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lipset, S.M. and Rokkan, S., 1967. Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction. In: S.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, eds. Party Systems and Voter Alignments. New York: Free Press. Mair, P., 2011. Smaghi vs. the Parties: Representative Government and Institutional Constraints. In Conference on Democracy in Straightjackets: Politics in an Age of Permanent Austerity. Munich: Ringberg Castle.

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Pedersen, M.N., 1967. Consensus and Conflict in the Danish Folketing 1945–65. Scandinavian Political Studies, 2 (A2) pp. 143–166. Pedersen, M.N., 1987. The Danish ‘Working Multiparty System’: Breakdown or Adaptation. In: H. Daalder, ed. Party Systems in Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium. London: Francis Pinter Publishers. pp. 1–60. Sartori, G., 1976. Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seeberg, H., 2013. The Power of the Loser: Opposition Policy Influence through AgendaSetting. Aarhus: Politica. Skjæveland, A., 2001. Party Cohesion in the Danish Parliament. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 7 (2) pp. 35–56. Stubager, R., 2013. The Changing Basis of Party Competition: Education, Authoritarian – Libertarian Values and Voting. Government and Opposition, 48 (3) pp. 372–397. Stubager, R., Hansen, K.M. and Andersen, J.G., 2013. Krisevalg: Økonomien og folketingsvalget 2011. Copenhagen: Djøf/Jurist-og Økonomforbundet.

3

Germany Heated debates but cooperative behaviour Christian Stecker*

Introduction This chapter characterises opposition parties in Germany with a specific focus on voting behaviour, the initiation of bills and the tabling of parliamentary questions. According to the comparative perspective of this volume, two factors explaining the behaviour of opposition parties in these domains shall receive particular attention. The first factor relates to the party system and the question of how changes in the party system such as the emergence of different types of non-mainstream opposition parties influence oppositional behaviour. Here, an important distinction is made between “responsible” versus “responsive” opposition parties (Goetz 2014; Mair 2008). Whereas the first type tends to cooperate with the government on important issues, the latter tends to adhere to a notion of policy purity (Pedersen 2012), representing the unmediated sentiment of its voters in an adversarial style in the parliamentary arena. The second dimension touches upon the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its impact on the interaction between government and opposition (Moury and De Giorgi 2015). The GFC has not only increased the salience of European integration as a potential cleavage in the party system (Marks and Wilson 2000). It has also forced governments in many EU member states to take hard and often unpopular decisions which may have encouraged opposition parties to take a more confrontational position towards the government. As will be demonstrated, however, Germany is exceptional with regard to the (lack of) influence these two factors have on government–opposition relations in recent years. In stark contrast to many other countries covered in this volume, neither the party system context nor the GFC has significantly altered opposition strategies and the conflict between government and opposition in recent years. Rather, dealing with GFC-related issues seems to have been smoothly incorporated into the pre-existing patterns of government–opposition interaction. Therefore, this chapter also highlights additional factors that are relevant for a comprehensive understanding of opposition behaviour in Germany (and beyond). These factors include the specific policy preferences of political

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parties on the crucial issue dimensions and institutional veto powers that opposition parties may possess by virtue of controlling a majority of seats in the second chamber, the Bundesrat. Whereas policy preferences and the related distances between parties influence the likelihood of voluntary agreement, the dispersion of veto powers influences the necessity of compromises. To begin with the first factor that is of interest in light of the comparative perspective of this volume, Germany’s party system has seen a number of considerable changes since 1949 (for an overview, see Table 3.1). The first democratic election after the Second World War seemingly reinstalled the highly fragmented party system of the Republic of Weimar, when eight parties gained seats in the newly elected Bundestag. However, until the early 1960s particularly the Christian Democrats profited from a swift process of concentration. Many parties vanished and left only the two main contenders Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats, with the Liberals (FDP) as a small but pivotal party in-between (Rudzio 2015). In the 1980s this two-and-a-half-party system was transformed when the Greens appeared on the political scene. With the first parliamentary representation of the Greens on the national level in 1983 the party system was now marked by a two-bloc competition between CDU/CSU and FDP on the one side and SPD and Greens on the other. Germany’s reunification in 1990 led to a further transformation (Niedermayer 2010) when the Left party (Hough et al. 2007), a successor of the communist party in the former German Democratic Republic, became the fifth party to be represented in the Bundestag. Most recently, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a Eurosceptic and right-populist party (Arzheimer 2015; Franzmann 2016) successfully gained seats in many parliaments at the state level. Yet, by a small margin the AfD failed to pass the 5 per cent hurdle at the last general election in 2013. Hence, in striking contrast to many other European democracies, Germany’s first chamber has, to date, no radical opposition parties among its ranks (Hobolt and Tilley 2016). Yet, this situation is likely to change after the upcoming national election in September 2017 as polling shows the AfD to be constantly around 10 per cent of the vote share. Party competition in Germany mainly revolves around two issue dimensions (Bräuninger and Debus 2012; Pappi and Shikano 2002): the classic economically grounded left-right conflict, and a conflict over values and societal politics such as policies on abortion or same-sex marriage. These two dimensions are, however, almost entirely reduced to a single one, as leftist positions on the economy highly correlate with progressive positions on societal policy and vice versa. It is only the FDP that combines a pronounced market orientation with progressive social values. Germany has a long tradition of forming majority coalitions (Saalfeld 2000) and has not witnessed any non-transitory minority governments (Ganghof and Stecker 2015). Most often government formation has been by partial alternation of parties. Until 1998, the FDP as a pivotal party effectively decided whether CDU or Social Democrats gained control of the Chancellery. The

National language name

Christlich Demokratische Union/Christlich Soziale Union

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

Freie Demokratische Partei Deutschlands

Die Grünen

Die Linke/Partei des demokratischen Sozialismus

Name abbreviation

CDU/CSU

SPD

FDP

Greens

Left Party/ PDS

Christian Democratic Union/ Christian Social Union Social Democratic Party of Germany Free Democratic Party Greens/ Alliance 90 The Left/ PDS

English name

Left socialist

Green

Liberal Party

Social democrat

Christian

Party family

Table 3.1 Political parties in the German parliament (1991–2017)

1990

1983

1949

1949

1949

First entry into parliament

small

small

small

mediumlarge

large

Size

2.4–11.9

6.7–10.7

6.2–14.6

23.0–40.9

33.8–43.8

Party stability (electoral support range)

In and out of government Never in government

In and out of government

In and out of government

In and out of government

Experience in government

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Table 3.2 Government and opposition composition (1991–2013) Prime minister (PM’s party)

Type of government

Government parties

Opposition parties

1991–1994

Kohl V (CDU)

majority coalition

CDU/CSU-FDP

1994–1998

Kohl VI (CDU)

majority coalition

CDU/CSU-FDP

1998–2002

Schröder I (SPD)

majority coalition

SPD-Greens

2002–2005 2005–2009

Schröder II (SPD) Merkel I (CDU)

majority coalition majority coalition

SPD-Greens CDU/CSU-SPD

2009–2013

Merkel II (CDU)

majority coalition

CDU/CSU-FDP

2013–2017

Merkel III (CDU)

majority coalition

CDU/CSU-SPD

SPD, Left Party, Greens SPD, Greens, Left Party CDU/CSU, Greens, FDP, Left Party CDU/CSU, FDP FDP, Left Party, Greens SPD, Left Party, Greens Left Party, Greens

general election of 1998 brought upon the first wholesale alternation, when a coalition of SPD and Greens ended the 16-year-long chancellorship of Helmut Kohl, who led a CDU/FDP coalition. After the elections in 2005, SPD and Greens lost their majority and CDU/CSU and SPD entered into a grand coalition controlling almost 75 per cent of the seats in the German Bundestag. It is noteworthy that this government faced the weakest opposition ever since the late 1960s – an opposition that could not even invoke important minority rights such as issuing an appeal to the constitutional court.1 A few years later, between 2009 and 2013 the situation on the benches of the opposition could have barely been more different. An ideologically homogenous opposition bloc of SPD and Greens (and an ideologically more remote Left Party) confronted the conservative government of CDU/CSU and FDP. Furthermore, since CDU/ CSU and FPD lost their majority in the second chamber, the Bundesrat, many major bills needed the approval of the SPD-Greens opposition. The elections of 2013 saw the demise of the FDP, which lost parliamentary representation for the first time since the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949. Again, a grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD took office confronting once more a remarkably weak opposition. Yet again, CDU/CSU and SPD do not control a majority of votes in the Bundesrat, which makes at least some of their legislative projects dependent on the approval of state governments that are led by other parties. With regard to the second factor, the outbreak of the GFC, Germany can also be seen as a notable exception in Europe. Arguably, Germany has fared very well during the crisis. With regard to some indicators, such as (negative) interest rates for German government bonds, it may even be seen as profiting from the crisis. Yet, the GFC has also highly politicised the issue of European

Germany 39

integration – a phenomenon well known in other countries but hitherto largely absent in Germany. The GFC has at least suspended the permissive consensus dominating public and elite opinions towards the European project. More specifically, the crisis brought divisive questions to the fore of political competition, such as to what extent Germany should help other Eurozone countries financially and whether Keynesian or austerity policies shall be pursued to overcome the crisis. Certainly, these questions touch upon the core ideologies of political parties and were therefore likely to leave imprints on government– opposition relations (Degner and Leuffen 2016). Along these lines of interest, this study analyses opposition behaviour in Germany between 1991, the beginning of the first Bundestag after reunification, and 2013, the end of the CDU/CSU and FDP coalition led by Angela Merkel. Altogether this period covers six full legislative terms, six cabinets and three different government–opposition constellations. To analyse the research questions in full breadth, several data sources are used. A dataset on legislative voting on all passed bills, a dataset on all bills that were introduced during that period and a dataset on all parliamentary questions (kleine Anfragen) that were submitted by any party in the period of investigation.

The opposition’s behaviour in the law-making process The introduction to this volume identifies two central factors that are likely to influence oppositional voting behaviour in parliament: first, the so-called permanent opposition parties will take more adversarial stances towards the government than parties that possess government experience. Second, the advent of the GFC has made interaction of government and opposition more conflictual. In order to assess the impact of these variables, this paper analyses data on legislative voting in the German Bundestag between 1991 and 2013. This data is part of a larger original dataset on the federal legislative process in Germany between 1972 and 2016 collected by the author (see also Manow and Burkhart 2007; Miller and Stecker 2008; Stecker 2016). It holds information on all 7955 bills processed during this period, including the type of bill, the respective policy field and the bill’s status (approved or rejected). It also includes the results of the final vote after the second and/or third reading in the Bundestag for all 3492 bills that were approved by the Bundestag and then finally announced between 1991 and 2013. Studying legislative voting behaviour of parties and MPs is not an easy endeavour in Germany as compared with other countries (Christiansen and Pedersen 2012; De Giorgi and Marangoni 2015; Hug 2010). Recorded votes are not the standard or even mostly used voting procedure. Most final votes on bills are semi-open, that is via raising hands or rising in seats (Saalfeld 1995). The behaviour of parties during these semi-open votes is documented with varying levels of detail in the plenary protocols. In the worst (and frequent)

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Christian Stecker

case, the chairing president of the session only notes that a bill has been adopted or rejected. In most cases, he or she gives a few more details such as that a bill has been passed with “a broad majority” or “with the majority of the coalition”. Inferring the voting behaviour of every individual party is therefore for some votes impossible.2 Let us start with a look at the aggregate phenomenon of legislative inclusiveness between 1991 and 2013 for all the 3492 final votes where the voting behaviour of each party could be clearly identified. Legislative inclusiveness gives the size of legislative majorities that support a collective binding decision.3 It is therefore a direct measure of the concept of consensus democracies (Ganghof et al. 2012; Müller and Jenny 2004; Williams 2012). On average, legislative support is very high, oscillating around 90 per cent. That is, on average 90 per cent of all MPs (more precisely, parties controlling 90 per cent of all seats) have supported the passage of a bill in the Bundestag. This margin is of course significantly larger than the government’s seat share, which ranges between 51 and 73 per cent in the period of investigation. Taking only non-technical4 bills into account, legislative support drops only slightly. Given the ubiquity of conflictual rhetoric that dominates political competition in the public realm, the level of legislative consensus turns out to be surprisingly high. It is, however, not exceptional with regard to other countries. For the Netherlands, for example, Otjes et al. (in this volume) report similarly high values. Upon inspection of the descriptive results, no clear effect of the GFC on legislative inclusiveness is visible. Table 3.3 disaggregates legislative inclusiveness to the level of individual parties. It gives the percentage of votes in which each opposition party voted with the government parties. Recall that this sample covers all votes on the final passage of those pieces of legislation that have been approved.5 The cabinets that were in place in the period of investigation can be read from the columns (see also Table 3.2). Again, the high level of agreement between government and opposition is evident. Admittedly, we lack a well-established yardstick for determining what level of government–opposition agreement is Table 3.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1991–2013) Kohl IV Kohl V Schröder I Schröder II Merkel I Merkel II (1991–1994) (1994–1998) (1998–2002) (2002–2005) (2005–2009) (2008–2013) CDU/ CSU FDP Greens Left SPD

100

100

70.8

71.4

100

100

100 − 57.6 83.5

100 71.4 67.6 82.4

67.6 100 78.6 100

71.6 100 − 100

68.7 65.1 54.8 100

100 69.0 55.2 74.8

Note: Parties in government in bold.

Germany 41

actually high. Yet, in light of the conflictual rhetoric between government and opposition in Germany, it is safe to say that one would not expect opposition parties to vote with the government in more than half of the votes. At the same time, there are significant differences between the five terms and with regard to individual parties. The two CDU/CSU and FDP cabinets under Kohl could count on regular support of the SPD, which voted in favour of around 83 per cent of all passed bills. Yet, Greens and the Left Party were more reluctant to side with the government. During Kohl IV the Left Party voted against almost every other bill supported by the government coalition. The wholesale alternation from a centre-right to a centre-left government in 1998 changed this picture considerably. When the cabinet of Schroeder II (SPD and Greens) was in place, the Left Party moved much closer to a government that was also much closer in ideological terms. The two opposition party groups, CDU/CSU and FDP, have almost the same agreement score with the government, ranging between 67 and 71 per cent. Interestingly, however, these similar agreement scores do not result from identical cooperation patterns on the level of individual bills. In only 87 per cent of all bills do CDU/CSU and FDP take the same stance towards a bill favoured by SPD and Greens, which is either reject or approve it. A closer look reveals that FDP and CDU/CSU differ in their voting behaviour with regard to bills that primarily touch upon issues of societal policies such as data protection or the naturalisation of foreigners, issues on which both parties take partly pronounced conflicting ideological positions. With Angela Merkel taking office in 2005 opposition parties’ readiness to support the government drops slightly. Clearly, the Left Party now takes the most adversarial position; interestingly with little difference between the time of the grand coalition (Merkel I) and the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition (Merkel II). The Greens and the FDP show higher agreement scores, respectively, yet slightly below the level experienced in previous terms. The Left Party’s distant position partly corroborates the expectation of this volume that permanent opposition parties are generally less inclined to side with the government on legislative votes as the Left Party is, at least formally, the only “permanent” opposition party in Germany. However, the overall pattern also invites a policy-driven explanation of these differences as the Left Party takes the most distant position to the CDU/FDP and CDU/SPD coalitions and is yet more likely than CDU and FDP to support the SPD/Green-led coalition. To test and control the influence of other factors that are likely to influence government–opposition agreement in legislative votes, a multivariate model is devised. A central additional factor that has to be taken into account is the veto power of the opposition by virtue of controlling a majority in the second chamber, the Bundesrat. The legislative powers of the Bundesrat originate in the German constitution, which discerns legislation into so-called consent (Zustimmungsgesetze) and objection (Einspruchsgesetze) bills (Stecker 2016). For the latter, the Bundesrat may only voice its objection, which can then be

42

Christian Stecker

overturned by a governmental majority, which is the absolute majority of all MPs (Kanzlermehrheit) in the Bundestag. In the case of consent laws, however, the veto is not only dilatory but absolute. More precisely, in order for a consent bill to pass, it needs to be approved by an absolute majority of state votes. If it fails to reach this majority, the bill is rejected (Lehnert et al. 2008). This means in effect that any government without a majority in the Bundesrat may be forced to compromise with (parts of) the opposition. As the party systems of the national and state level are quite symmetrical, parties that are in the opposition in the Bundestag may often control state governments whose votes are necessary for a bill to pass in the Bundesrat. Hence the majority constellations in combination with the type of bill are likely to be an important predictor for the degree of consensus. Indeed, the work of Burkhart and Manow (2006) shows that the level of conflict in the Bundestag’s votes is significantly related to majority constellations in the Bundesrat. Miller and Stecker (2008) prove the same logic for the work of the Bundestag’s committees. This point is, of course, crucial when it comes to interpreting the nature of government–opposition agreement. Without a veto threat, agreement may be voluntary as a function of ideological proximity between the government and an opposition party, or flowing from the centripetal logic of majority rule in a multi-dimensional policy space (McGann 2006). With the veto in place, however, cooperation may simply result from the necessity that the government seeks a policy compromise with the opposition before a vote as it wants its bills enacted. In the regression, consent laws are identified with a dummy variable. Furthermore, government–opposition consensus will be influenced by the policy distances between parties. In many instances the mover of the motion is simply a proxy for the policy position of the motion to be voted upon. This is most obvious in the case of mixed initiatives that are submitted both by government and opposition parties. The consensual vote on such motions may simply restate the consensus that already existed in introducing the motion. To the contrary, as shown in many analyses of legislative voting, initiatives solely introduced by the government facilitate below-average consensus (Bräuninger et al. 2016: 97; Mújica and Sánchez-Cuenca 2006). To measure policy distances, I calculate the distance between each individual party group and the government on the general left-right axis as provided by the Chapel Hill Expert survey. Government positions are calculated in the conventional way by using the seat-weighted average of the cabinet parties’ individual positions (Warwick 2001). It is also well known from the literature that different policy areas exhibit different potentials for conflict and consensus. Issues that lie at the heart of party competition will see more conflictual votes than issues that are not structurally related to party competition. It is debatable whether policy areas possess any intrinsic conflict potential or are dependent on the dominant lines of conflict in a particular country (Klingemann et al. 2006; Benoit and Laver 2006). Certainly,

Germany 43

all topics that are embedded on the classical left-right axis will facilitate fewer consensual votes. Therefore, using the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) category “Law, Crime” as a baseline, government–opposition agreement in three prominent policy areas is identified by using dummy variables. A more subtle effect on legislative vote consensus lies in the difference between technical and non-technical bills (Ganghof et al. 2012). Everyday parliamentary business is packed with many technical legislative tasks – such as the transposition of EU regulations – that invite little potential for political disagreement. For a substantively interesting interpretation of government–opposition agreement in legislative voting, it is therefore indispensable to flag these bills. I do so by identifying all bills as non-technical that receive a substantial first reading by which parties can indicate the importance they attach to a matter. The unit of analysis is whether an individual party agreed or disagreed with the government during a final passage vote. Accordingly, this binary dependent variable is modelled on a logistic regression. Table 3.4 presents the results of

Table 3.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Germany (1991–2013) Model 1 Consent Bills Policy distance Non-technical Bills Labour, Employment Finance International Affairs Kohl IV Schroeder I Schroeder II Merkel I Merkel II Observations Correctly predicted Pseudo-R2 (McFadden)

1.247*** (4.45) 0.739*** (−11.39) 0.374*** (−19.31) 0.522*** (−6.03) 0.613*** (−6.60) 2.731*** (12.64) 1.486*** (4.62) 1.094 (0.98) 0.339*** (−11.40) 0.934 (−0.80) 1.709*** (6.27) 9324 70.74 0.123

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Christian Stecker

the regression analysis reporting odds ratios. Coefficients below 1 indicate that an increase in the independent variable reduces the likelihood that an opposition party sides with the government; coefficients above 1 indicate an increased likelihood of consensual opposition versus government voting. As can be read from the table, consent bills on which the Bundesrat controls an absolute veto see a higher rate of government–opposition agreement than objection bills on which the Bundesrat only has a suspensive veto. Furthermore, when bills are non-technical in nature and involve political conflict there is also – unsurprisingly – a higher voting conflict. Policy distance on the general left-right axis is also associated with more voting disagreement between government and opposition. With regard to voting agreement within specific policy areas, it is noted that bills on Labour, Employment and Finance see significantly more conflict than bills on Law and Crime, which are used as a baseline. International affairs and foreign aid, on the other hand, raise consensus as expected. Note that the full model predicts 70.7 per cent of observations correctly as compared with 65.7 per cent in an empty model. There is no clear evidence for a significant effect of the GFC on the cooperation between government and opposition in legislative voting. A dummy variable (not shown) differentiating between pre- and post-crisis votes with September 2008 as the cut-off point produces a negligible and insignificant coefficient. Of course a general effect of the GFC on legislative voting might be too blunt an expectation. Parliaments vote on a variety of bills, many of which are not related to the GFC. Hence in an additional model (not shown), I tested a potential refinement of the hypothesis, that is, that the crisis should first and foremost influence policy areas related to the EU. Accordingly, using a scheme suggested by Nugent (2010) and the categories of the CAP, I coded all bills along their level of EU involvement. However, no coherent pattern emerges that would indicate a statistical relationship between the level of EU involvement and government–opposition conflict. Different findings may evolve when one looks at more specific subsamples of votes. Degner and Leuffen (2016), for example, analyse 17 roll call votes on financial aid related to the European stability mechanism (ESM). While they find a broad consensus among SPD, Greens, CDU/CSU and FDP with regard to these measures, they also show that the Left Party takes its role as permanent opposition party literally and voted in all but one instance against the government.

The opposition actors beyond voting behaviour Legislative voting makes up for only a tiny fraction of parties’ everyday activities in parliament. This section will therefore analyse other tools that feature prominently in the relationship between government and opposition. More specifically, it will look at the introduction of bills and the tabling of parliamentary questions. Whereas the introduction of bills may serve as an important tool to signal alternative positions to the electorate (Mayhew 1974), the

Germany 45

latter is a prime instrument to scrutinise the government (Wiberg 1995). The expectation outlined in the introduction is that permanent opposition parties put more weight on scrutiny than on the submission of bills and that they have intensified their scrutiny activity after the outburst of the GFC. To analyse oppositional scrutiny activity, I collected data on all 9575 parliamentary questions (kleine Anfragen) between 2002 (Schröder II) and the ongoing term until 2017 (Merkel III). This specific type of parliamentary question can be initiated by either 5 per cent of all MPs or a parliamentary party group (PPG).6 It is therefore well suited to analyse collective partisan strategies that are of interest here. Other types of questions, such as oral questions, that may be tabled by single MPs without the permission of the party leadership are more guided by an individual logic of action such as catering to the needs of specific constituencies (Martin 2011). Table 3.5 presents a look at the usage of parliamentary questions by all parties.7 The table gives the number of questions for each party divided by the number of MPs. This reflects the idea that the number of questions a party group can ask is influenced by its resources. Different patterns are observable. Most importantly, opposition parties are effectively the sole users of parliamentary questions. This is well known from many other parliaments. Opposition parties often turn to non-legislative instruments such as parliamentary questions (Green-Pedersen 2010: 350), as they are a tool well suited to go public on topics that the government may want to keep out of the public realm. Moreover, government MPs do not need to turn to parliamentary questions for their scrutiny activity, as they can often use informal party channels to receive information from the executive (Auel and Benz 2005).

Table 3.5 Parliamentary questions of all parties, per government (2002–2017) Number of parliamentary questions per PPG (per MP) Schröder II (2002–2005)

Merkel I (2005–2009)

Merkel II (2008–2013)

Merkel III (2013–2017)

SPD

0*

1* (~0) 992 (14,44) 780 (15,3) 1484 (27,48) ~0*

39* (0,16) 0*

Left

337 (1,36) 456 (9,7) 1* (~0) Not represented

28* (0.09) Not represented 1163 (18,46) 1505 (23,52) 0*

CDU/CSU FDP Greens

1442 (21,20) 1678 (22,08) 461 (3,16)

Notes: Parties in government in bold. Data on legislative initiative per party has not been presented here, as a significant amount of initiatives are introduced by two or more parties jointly.

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Among the opposition, the Left Party stands out by tabling the largest share of questions. In the ongoing term, being one of two opposition parties, it is responsible for 2/3 of all parliamentary questions. As can also be seen, there is an increase over time in the overall usage of parliamentary questions. On closer inspection, this rise can be associated with the outbreak of the GFC. Around the year 2009 all opposition parties increased their usage of parliamentary questions. Moreover, a dictionary-based text analysis of all questions further corroborates this association. Building on the work of Rauh (2015), we compiled a dictionary of EU references covering 247 German key words. Using pattern-matching procedures implemented in R (Nolan and Temple Lang 2014), this dictionary was applied to identify EU references in all parliamentary questions. Interestingly, since 2009 the overall number of questions with reference to the EU significantly increased from around 25 to 28 per month. This increase has been most pronounced for the Left Party, which more than doubled its questions on European matters. Asking on average 8 EU-related questions per month during the year of 2009, in 2016 this number has risen to 20 questions per month on average (see also Paasch and Stecker 2016). The link between scrutiny activity and the GFC is corroborated by a more fine-grained analysis conducted by Wonka and Göbel (2016) in the period 2009 to 2013 (cabinet Merkel II). Focussing on the full breadth of parliamentary control instruments (i.e. oral, urgent and written questions), they show a clear correlation between EU-related scrutiny activity and crisis policies such as the adoption of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). It is also shown that the variation across parties’ activities is partly explained by their ideological stance. The further away a party is from the political centre the more it raises the salience of EU crisis politics by engaging in scrutiny activity (Wonka and Göbel 2016: 222). Notably, ideological differences are no less an important explanatory factor for scrutiny activity than opposition status of a party. It should also be noted, however, that rather than a clear opposition towards the overall crisis politics of the government, oppositional scrutiny activity was mainly directed towards the technical details of otherwise largely consensual policies. Another important tool for opposition parties is the submission of bills. Obviously, hardly any opposition bill makes it to the statute book in parliamentary democracies where the government takes a monopoly over the parliamentary agenda (Bräuninger and Debus 2009; Tsebelis 2002). However, bills still serve as an important signalling device by which alternative proposals can be presented to the public and constituents. To analyse legislative activity I collected a dataset on federal legislation comprising all bills that have been processed between 1991 and 2016. Note that in Germany bills may be submitted by collective actors only, including parliamentary party groups, the government or state governments via the Bundesrat (Ismayr 2008). Private members’ bills that are well known in other democracies are not at the

Germany 47

disposal of German MPs (Mattson 1995). Moreover, bills may be submitted by more than one collective actor. Around one third of all bills submitted by party groups in the Bundestag were collective initiatives of two or more groups. Usually, if the government introduces bills via its party groups, these party groups sign the draft bill together. A closer look at legislative initiatives reveals a picture well known from other parliamentary democracies: the government is the main initiator of successful legislation in Germany (see Figure 3.1). In the period of investigation, government parties submitted 4809 bills, of which 83 per cent became law. Although the opposition also submits bills, hardly any of its proposals ever get into the statute book. More specifically, from all 1329 bills submitted by the opposition, only 3 per cent got enacted. When looking at the activity of individual opposition parties, no exceptional differences are visible. In the ongoing term, for example, the Greens have submitted 47 bills, while the other opposition party, the Left Party, has submitted only 25. These differences are, however, hard to relate to differing strategies these parties may pursue in the parliamentary arena. Although cross-party initiatives are rare, their success rate is very high (81 per cent). Obviously, the joint introduction of bills by both government and opposition already presupposes a broad support that is restated during the legislative vote. State governments also quite actively introduce federal legislation, with a success rate of 12 per cent (Stecker 2015). There is also some evidence that bill submissions are influenced by the issue priorities of individual parties.

Government

83%

Opposition

3%

Cross-party

81%

State Government

12%

0

1,000

failed bills passed bills 2,000

3,000

Number of bills

Figure 3.1 Number of bills and success rate by initiator (1991–2016)

4,000

48

Christian Stecker

More conflictual times yet to come Conflictual rhetoric marks the interaction of parties in the public realm in Germany. Yet, when it comes to legislative voting, broad consensus is the norm. In 65 per cent of all 9384 voting decisions studied in this chapter, opposition parties have sided with the government. At closer inspection, there is not a huge variation across parties. As the only permanent opposition party in the sample, the Left Party still voted with the government around 55 per cent of the time. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, sided with the governing coalition 80 per cent of the time, followed by the Christian Democrats agreeing with the government 71 per cent of the time. This also means that the two main contenders for the office of the Chancellor, CDU/CSU and SPD, are quite cooperative towards governments headed by the other party respectively. Note that roughly 20 per cent of the votes analysed occurred during a grand coalition where both parties held office, 50 per cent during a CDU/CSU and FDP coalition and 30 per cent during a coalition of SPD and Greens. One reason for this overall cooperative behaviour is likely to be institutional. Around half of all bills require the consent of the Bundesrat, which is often controlled by non-governmental majorities (Stecker 2016). Hence, in order to get its bills passed, the federal government often needs to accommodate the preferences of at least parts of the opposition before seeking a decision in the Bundestag (Manow and Burkhart 2007). The data, however, shows that this does not tell the whole story. Objection bills, on which the Bundesrat enjoys only a dilatory veto, are still supported by opposition parties 62 per cent of the time, which is only 7 per cent lower than for consent bills, which are subject to an absolute Bundesrat veto. According to close observers of the legislative process (e.g. Ismayr 2012), this high consensus must not be misunderstood as the result of inclusive negotiations across the aisle of government and opposition. There is virtually no evidence that the minimal winning coalition in place considers the preferences of opposition parties – if not needed for the passage of a bill – when drafting bills in the federal executive, debating bills in the plenary and amending bills in the Bundestag’s committees. A speculative answer to the puzzle of high consensus might lie in the fact that in advanced democracies there are not many legislative decisions that fan the flames of party political conflict. Rather, many items are routine and highly technical business that are reasonably approached by the respective policy experts of all parties in a cooperative manner. The data suggests that there might be some truth to this speculation. Only 32 per cent of all adopted bills studied in this chapter are fully debated in the plenary. That means that in the other cases all parties present in the Bundestag agree on skipping a reading and referring the bills to the policy experts in the committees right away. In this manner, the potential for conflict might be reserved to a few highly salient decisions such as tax reforms (Zohlnhöfer 1999). In short, our

Germany 49

understanding of the causes of legislative inclusiveness in Germany is still far from complete. Overall, in the period of investigation there was little change in the patterns of interaction between government and opposition in Germany. This is not to say, however, that Germany has remained untouched by the GFC and the general rise of populism across Western democracies. As indicated in the election of state parliaments in recent years, Germany’s party system is witnessing an ongoing transformation. With its pronounced Eurosceptic and right-wing platform, the AfD has succeeded in attracting a substantial electoral support base. Though this base may shrink when pressures from both the GFC and the refugee crisis fade, it is hardly to vanish. The rise of the AfD has contributed to a further fragmentation of the party system. With more than six parties in parliament, traditional alliances of two parties and even grand coalitions of CDU and SPD now often fall short of an absolute majority. This forces parties to enter into more heterogeneous and complex alliances. In the general election in September 2017 these changes transcended regional politics and entered into the national area with a major transformation of government– opposition relations.

Conclusions This chapter has analysed the behaviour of opposition parties in the German Bundestag specifically focussing on legislative voting and scrutiny activity via parliamentary questions. Two general conclusions can be drawn along the research questions of this volume. First, the permanent opposition hypothesis finds mixed support. With regard to legislative voting, the variance in government support among opposition parties may be more directly attributed to different political preferences than to the type of permanent opposition parties. This result may be due to the fact that only the Left Party can be conceptualised as a permanent opposition party as it has never been part of a federal government. Right-wing populist parties that make up for the permanent opposition in many other countries, however, were not present in the Bundestag in the period of investigation. With regard to parliamentary questions, however, there is some evidence speaking for the permanent opposition hypothesis. While the Left Party has been most active with regard to the tabling of parliamentary questions, it has also framed these questions with regard to EU affairs more often than other parties. Second, the analyses provide no significant evidence that the GFC has altered the patterns of cooperation between government and opposition in Germany. Opposition parties support bills sponsored by the government at a considerably high level, and this has not changed with the crisis at least on the aggregate level. A closer look on individual bills directly related to crises policies, however, shows that the Left Party has engaged in fundamental rejection (Degner and Leuffen 2016). Yet, except for the Left Party, the crisis policies of

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the federal government have been carried by a broad consensus in the Bundestag (Wonka 2016). The stability of government–opposition cooperation may be attributed to the fact that Germany fared exceptionally well during the crisis and that strong Eurosceptic preferences were not yet presented in the Bundestag. This situation changed after the general election in September 2017.

Notes * I am indebted to Georg Heilmann and Sebastian Riedl for excellent research assistance. 1 Note that there are no genuine opposition rights in Germany but only rights that can be used by a parliamentary minority (e.g. 25 per cent of all MPs to install a committee of enquiry). Accordingly, if all opposition parties fail to reach this minority requirement, the German opposition effectively enjoys no rights at all. 2 As a work-around for missing information on voting behavior in the plenary protocols, I also collected information on parties’ voting behavior in the committees. How parties vote in the plenary on a bill and on the committee report (Beschlussvorlage) in the committee rooms is virtually identical. 3 Here we also count abstention as support of a bill, as abstentions effectively count in favor of its passage. 4 The category of technical bills is defined by the length of the first reading. While technical and uncontroversial matters are often immediately transferred to a committee (“non-debated bills”) without debate (Überweisungen im vereinfachten Verfahren ohne Debatte), increasing debate length indicates that the issue is important to parties and that they are willing to invest parliamentary time to present their views on it to the public (Linn and Sobolewski, 2010, p. 47). 5 At first sight a sole focus on passed legislation could be seen as increasing the risk of selection bias. If we only focus on passed bills, i.e. those bills that received sufficient support to enter the statute book, agreement might be overestimated. Yet, when we are interested in the oppositional support of government bills, there is no risk of selection bias, as the support of the government parties is sufficient for bills to pass. 6 As a consequence of the 5 per cent hurdle in the electoral system, parliamentary party groups control at least 5 per cent of MPs in the Bundestag. 7 Parties that were in the government during a specific term are marked with an asterisk.

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Germany 51 De Giorgi, E. & Marangoni, F. (2015). Government Laws and the Opposition Parties’ Behavior in Parliament. Acta Politica 50: 64–81. Degner, H. & Leuffen, D. (2016). Keynes, Friedman, or Monnet? Explaining Parliamentary Voting Behaviour on Fiscal Aid for Euro Area Member States. West European Politics: 1–21. Franzmann, S. T. (2016). Calling the Ghost of Populism: The AfD’s Strategic and Tactical Agendas until the EP Election 2014. German Politics 25(4): 457–479. Ganghof, S. & Stecker, C. (2015). Investiture Rules and Government Formation in Germany. In: B. E. Rasch, S. Martin & J. A. Cheibub (eds.), Unpacking Parliamentarism: How Investiture Rules Shape Government Formation. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 67–85. Ganghof, S., Stecker, C., Eppner, S. & Heeß, K. (2012). Flexible und inklusive Mehrheiten? Eine Analyse der Gesetzgebung der Minderheitsregierung in NRW. Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 43(4): 887–900. Goetz, K. H. (2014). A Question of Time: Responsive and Responsible Democratic Politics. West European Politics 37(2): 379–399. Green-Pedersen, C. (2010). Bringing Parties into Parliament: The Development of Parliamentary Activities in Western Europe. Party Politics 16(3): 347–369. Hobolt, S. B. & Tilley, J. (2016). Fleeing the Centre: The Rise of Challenger Parties in the Aftermath of the Euro Crisis. West European Politics 39(5): 971–991. Hough, D., Koß, M. & Olsen, J. (2007). The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hug, S. (2010). Selection Effects in Roll Call Votes. British Journal of Political Science 40(1): 225–235. Ismayr, W. (2008). Gesetzgebung im politischen System Deutschlands. In: W. Ismayr (ed.), Gesetzgebung in Westeuropa. EU-Staaten und Europäische Union. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften: 383–429. Ismayr, W. u. M. v. A. F. (2012). Der Deutsche Bundestag. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Klingemann, H. D., A. Volkens, J. Bara, I. Budge, M. D. McDonald (2006). Mapping Policy Preferences II: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments in Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD, 1990–2003. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Lehnert, M., Linhart, E. & Shikano, S. (2008). Never Say Never again: Legislative Failure in German Bicameralism. German Politics 17(3): 367–380. Linn, S. and F. Sobolewski (2010). The German Bundestag. Functions and Procedures. Rheinbreitbach, NDV. Mair, P. (2008). The Challenge to Party Government. West European Politics 31(1–2): 211–234. Manow, P. & Burkhart, S. (2007). Legislative Self-Restraint under Divided Government in Germany, 1976–2002. Legislative Studies Quarterly 32(2): 167–191. Marks, G. & Wilson, C. J. (2000). The Past in the Present: A Cleavage Theory of Party Response to European Integration. British Journal of Political Science 30(3): 433–459. Martin, S. (2011). Using Parliamentary Questions to Measure Constituency Focus: An Application to the Irish Case. Political Studies 59(2): 472–488. Mattson, I. (1995). Private Members’ Initiatives and Amendments. In: H. Döring (ed.), Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe. Frankfurt: Campus: 449–487. Mayhew, D. R. (1974). Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven: Yale University Press. McGann, A. J. (2006). Social Choice and Comparing Legislatures: Constitutional versus Institutional Constraints. Journal of Legislative Studies 12(3–4): 443–431. Miller, B. & Stecker, C. (2008). Consensus by Default? Interaction of Government and Opposition Parties in the Committees of the German Bundestag. German Politics 17(3): 307–324.

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Moury, C. and De Giorgi, E. (2015). Introduction: Conflict and Consensus in Parliament during the Economic Crisis. Journal of Legislative Studies 21(1): 1–13. Mújica, A. & Sánchez-Cuenca, I. (2006). Consensus and Parliamentary Opposition: The Case of Spain. Government and Opposition 41(1): 86–108. Müller, W. C. & Jenny, M. (2004). “Business as usual” mit getauschten Rollen oder Konflikt statt Konsensdemokratie? Parlamentarische Beziehungen unter der ÖVP-FPÖKoalition. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 33: 309–326. Niedermayer, O. (2010). Von der Zweiparteiendominanz zum Pluralismus: Die Entwicklung des deutschen Parteiensystems im westeuropäischen Vergleich. Politische Vierteljahresschrift 51(1): 1–13. Nolan, D. & Temple Lang, D. (2014). XML and Web Technologies for Data Sciences with R. New York, Heidelberg: Springer. Nugent, N. (2010). The Government and Politics of the European Union. European Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Paasch, J. & Stecker, C. (2016). Backbenchers to the Front? Parliamentary Questions in National Parliaments as a Communicative Instrument in EU Affairs. Paper presented at the 3rd General Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments, Munich. Pappi, F. U. & Shikano, S. (2002). Die politisierte Sozialstruktur als mittelfristig stabile Basis einer deutschen Normalwahl. KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 54(3): 444–475. Pedersen, H. H. (2012). Policy-Seeking Parties in Multiparty Systems: Influence or Purity? Party Politics 18(3): 297–314. Rauh, C. (2015). Communicating Supranational Governance? The Salience of EU Affairs in the German Bundestag, 1991–2013. European Union Politics 16(1): 116–138. Rudzio, W. (2015). Das politische System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Lehrbuch, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Saalfeld, T. (1995). Parteisoldaten und Rebellen. Eine Untersuchung zur Geschlossenheit der Fraktionen im Deutschen Bundestag (1949–1990). Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Saalfeld, T. (2000). Coalitions in Germany: Stable Parties, Chancellor Democracy and the Art of Informal Settlement. In: W. C. Müller & K. Ström (eds.), Coalition Governments in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 32–85. Stecker, C. (2015). Parties on the Chain of Federalism: Position-Taking and Multi-Level Party Competition in Germany. West European Politics 38(6): 1305–1326. Stecker, C. (2016). The Effects of Federalism Reform on the Legislative Process in Germany. Regional & Federal Studies 26(5): 603–624. Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warwick, P. V. (2001). Coalition Policy in Parliamentary Democracies: Who Gets How Much and Why. Comparative Political Studies 34(10): 1212–1236. Wiberg, M. (1995). Parliamentary Questioning: Control by Communication? In: H. Döring (ed.), Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe. Frankfurt: Campus: 179–222. Williams, B. D. (2012). Institutional Change and Legislative Vote Consensus in New Zealand. Legislative Studies Quarterly 37(4): 559–574. Wonka, A. (2016). The Party Politics of the Euro Crisis in the German Bundestag: Frames, Positions and Salience. West European Politics 39(1): 125–144. Wonka, A. & Göbel, S. (2016). Parliamentary Scrutiny and Partisan Conflict in the Euro Crisis: The Case of the German Bundestag. Comparative European Politics 14(2): 215–231. Zohlnhöfer, R. (1999). Die große Steuerreform 1998/99: Ein Lehrstück für Politikentwicklung bei Parteienwettbewerb im Bundesstaat. Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 30(2): 326–345.

4

The Netherlands The reinvention of consensus democracy Simon Otjes, Tom Louwerse and Arco Timmermans

Introduction The Netherlands used to be a proto-typical consensus democracy (Lijphart 1968). All major political parties were integrated into an ‘elite cartel’ (Andeweg et al. 2008). On important issues, even if political parties were officially part of the opposition, they were consulted. Legislation passed through parliament with large majorities; in parliament and in consultative bodies, where all societal subgroups are represented, spokespersons from groups that were not represented in cabinet were also heard. The role of the ‘real opposition’ was relegated to small, permanent opposition parties (Daalder 1966). In 2002 the Netherlands was suddenly woken from this consensual dream by the entry of the radical right-wing populist Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) into parliament. This party argued that there was widespread societal dissatisfaction with the consensual political system and it introduced a more polarised style of politics (Otjes 2011). Since 2002, one former Member of Parliament argued, the Tweede Kamer (lower house of the bicameral parliament) “has never been calm again.”1 In 2008, as in many Western countries, the financial and economic crisis hit the Netherlands. Not long thereafter, in 2010, the first minority coalition government in almost a century took office. It needed a way of working together with opposition parties to ensure majorities for reform and austerity packages. This situation has continued until the end of our period of analysis in 2015, when the government in office lacked a majority in the Senate and therefore has also had to strike some kind of deal with opposition parties. The Netherlands has almost every characteristic of a consensus democracy: from its extreme proportional electoral system via institutionalised, corporatist relations with interest groups, coalition government and bicameralism with a legislative veto for the Senate to its multiparty system. With on average more than five effective political parties, Dutch politics can truly be characterised as pluralistic. Table 4.1 presents all thirteen parties in the Tweede Kamer between 1998 and 2015 and Table 4.2 lists the governments formed during this period. In recent years, elections have become very volatile: on average, more than 20 per cent of seats changes hands at every election. The electoral fortunes of

Labour Party Christian-Democratic Appeal Liberal Party Socialist Party Democrats 66 GreenLeft Freedom Party List Pim Fortuyn ChristianUnion Reformed Political Party Party for the Animals Liveable Netherlands

Partij van de Arbeid Christen-Democratisch Appèl

Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie Socialistische Partij Democraten 66 GroenLinks Partij voor de Vrijheid Lijst Pim Fortuyn ChristenUnie Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij Partij voor de Dieren

Leefbaar Nederland

PvdA CDA

VVD Left Socialist Liberal Green Extreme right Extreme right Christian-Democratic Christian-Democratic Green Special Interest Populist

Liberal

Social-Democrat Christian-Democrat

Party Family

1994 1967 1989 2006 2002 20021 1922 2006 2012 2002

1948

1946 1977

5–25 3–14 4–11 9–24 0–26 3–6 2–3 2 2 0–2

22–41

23–45 13–44

Never In and out of government Never Never In and out of government In and out of government Never Never Never Never

In and out of government

In and out of government In and out of government

First Party Experience in Government entry into Stability Parliament (electoral support range)

1 The CU was formed in 2001 as a merger of two small protestant parties, the Gereformeerd Politiek Verbond (Reformed Political League GPV) and the Reformatorische Politieke Federatie (Reformed Political Federation, RPF), which had never been in government. These two parties have cooperated intensively since the beginning of the 1998 parliamentary term and therefore are treated as one party in this analysis.

SP D66 GL PVV LPF CU SGP PvdD 50Plus LN

English

Name Dutch abbreviation

Table 4.1 Political parties in the Dutch parliament (1998–2017)

The Netherlands

55

Table 4.2 Government and opposition composition (1998–2014) Prime Minister (PM’s Party)

Type of Government

Government Parties

Opposition Parties

1998–2002

Kok (PvdA)

PvdA, VVD, D66

2002–2003

Balkenende (CDA)

2003–2006

Balkenende (CDA)

CDA, GL, SP, CU, SGP PvdA, SP, GL, D66, CU, SGP, LN PvdA, SP, LPF, GL, CU, SGP

2006–2007

Balkenende (CDA)

Oversized Majority Minimumwinning Coalition Minimumwinning Coalition Minority Coalition

2007–2010

Balkenende (CDA)

CDA, PvdA, CU

2010

Balkenende (CDA)

Minimumwinning Coalition Minority Coalition

2010–2012

Rutte (VVD)

VVD, CDA (PVV)

2012–2017

Rutte (VVD)

Minority Coalition with Support Party Minimumwinning Coalition1

CDA, LPF, VVD CDA, VVD, D66 CDA, VVD

CDA, CU

VVD, PvdA

PvdA, SP, LPF, GL, D66, CU, SGP VVD, SP, PVV, GL, D66, SGP, PvdD PvdA, VVD, SP, PVV, GL, D66, SGP, PvdD PvdA, SP, D66, GL, CU, SGP, PvdD CDA, PVV, SP, D66, CU, GL, SGP, PvdD, 50Plus

1 The coalition did not have a majority in the Senate and therefore effectively functioned as a Minority Coalition.

almost all parties are tempestuous. Some stability is afforded by the patterns of coalition formation: the centre-left Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA), the centre-right Christian-Democrats (Christen-Democratisch Appèl, CDA) and the right-wing Liberal Party (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie, VVD) have formed the core of every government since 1977. Governments form by partial alternation: at least one of these three parties stays in government, often one of these parties rotates out of government and a third rotates into government. Except for the inclusion of two of these three parties, cabinet formation is quite open: other parties often join the coalition from the socialliberal Democrats 66 (Democraten 66, D66) via the centrist Christian-democratic ChristianUnion (ChristenUnie, CU) to the short-lived right-wing LPF. Until 2010 informal norms about cabinet formation prevented the formation of minority governments (Andeweg 2011): in 2010, a centre-right minority government was formed with support of the radical right-wing populist Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV). Still, some parties are relegated to being permanent opposition parties: the right-wing conservative Christian Political

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Reformed Party (Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij, SGP), the eldest party in the Netherlands, is one example, but so are the left-wing Socialist Party (Socialistische Partij, SP) and GreenLeft (GroenLinks, GL). The open electoral system has allowed for the entry of new political parties, such as the ‘deep green’ Party for the Animals (Partij voor de Dieren, PvdD), the pensioners’ party 50Plus and the populist reform party Liveable Netherlands (Leef baar Nederland, LN). For the purposes of analysing parliamentary voting, the Dutch political space can be considered to be one-dimensional, ranging from the left (where we find the Socialist Party) to the right (where we find the Freedom Party). Until 2002 a second religious dimension separated the CDA, CU and SGP from the other parties. Since 2002, with the entry of the LPF into parliament, new cultural issues, such as immigration, Islam and civic integration, have become more important (Otjes 2011). Voting on these issues mostly follows the left-right dimension, strengthening the left-right division in parliament. This study analyses opposition party behaviour between 1998 and 2015. Our analysis focuses on the effect of the global financial crisis in 2008, which became a prolonged European sovereign debt crisis between 2009 and today. We will look at two periods: before the crisis (operationalised as before 28 September 2008, when the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourgish governments nationalised the bank Fortis) and after the onset of the crisis. As is standard in all the chapters in this volume, the tables will show the data per cabinet. The analysis will focus on the difference in the voting behaviour and the use of parliamentary tools before and after the crisis, and by taking larger periods together, we are able to look at the effect of the crisis more directly.2 We use three sources of data. First, for parliamentary voting we use a database on parliamentary voting obtained from the website of the Eerste Kamer, the Upper House. As bills are only voted upon in the Eerste Kamer if they are approved by the Tweede Kamer, this data only contains bills that were voted on in both the chambers. We added the three government bills that were rejected in the Tweede Kamer, the Lower House, which the Eerste Kamer never voted on, from the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset (Louwerse et al. 2018). For the use of other parliamentary tools, we also used the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset, which includes motions, amendments and written questions and a hand-coded list of oral questions asked during the question hour (Timmermans and Breeman 2010).

The opposition’s behaviour in the law-making process The research framework of this book formulated three expectations about opposition voting behaviour in parliament. First, permanent opposition parties tend to be less cooperative than opposition parties with experience in government. Therefore, such permanent, non-cooperative opposition parties may be characterised as ‘radical’ opposition. Second, the global financial crisis and

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the ensuing Eurozone crisis decreased the willingness of all opposition parties to cooperate. The third expectation is that this ‘crisis’ effect was stronger for parties that were already consigned to be opposition parties. We will analyse those hypotheses here, contrasting the pre-crisis period (1998–2008) and the post-crisis period (2008–2014). Based on previous research, our analysis will take two confounding factors into account: the composition of the government (centre-left or centre-right) and the nature of governing coalition (majority or minority cabinets) (Otjes and Louwerse 2014; Louwerse et al. 2017). On average the government proposes around 244 bills per year. The financial crisis has not affected this: before 2008 the government proposed on average 245 bills per year, and after the crisis the amount was 243. Table 4.3 displays the extent to which political parties voted in favour of government-initiated bills between 1998 and 2014. The first thing that stands out is that none lies below 80 per cent: on the whole, opposition parties tend to support legislation by large margins. Andeweg (2013) observed that such patterns of support go back to at least 1963 and that the extreme levels of support may be related to the tradition of consensus democracy and the tradition of cooperation on policy between specialists. During the pre-crisis period, opposition parties on average supported 94 per cent of government proposals. Contrary to expectation, the two populist parties score highest: first is the short-lived centrist populist party Liveable Netherlands, which supported all government-initiated legislation

Table 4.3 Percentage of favourable votes to government bills by all parties, per government (1998–2014)

PvdA CDA VVD SP D66 GL PVV LPF CU SGP PvdD 50Plus LN

Kok

Balkenende

Rutte

II

I

II

III

IV

V

I

II

1.00 0.95 0.99 0.90 0.99 0.94 – 0.98 0.96 0.94 – – 1.00

0.99 1.00 1.00 0.91 0.98 0.95 – 0.99 0.99 1.00 – – 1.00

0.96 0.99 0.99 0.88 0.99 0.90 – 0.98 0.97 0.97 – – –

0.96 1.00 0.98 0.87 0.99 0.89 1.00 1.00 0.96 0.98 0.98 – –

1.00 1.00 0.92 0.90 0.96 0.96 0.88 – 1.00 0.98 0.91 – –

0.99 1.00 0.98 0.88 1.00 0.98 0.70 – 0.98 0.97 0.94 – –

0.93 1.00 0.99 0.87 0.95 0.93 0.93 – 0.95 0.98 0.85 0.96 –

1.00 0.96 1.00 0.86 0.96 0.90 0.83 – 0.97 0.96 0.82 0.81 –

Notes: Governing parties in bold. Numbers in italics represent very limited number of votes when a party that is new to parliament participates in votes during the short periods when a cabinet that has already submitted its resignation continues to govern after elections before a new cabinet is formed.

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during its short term in parliament, likely because of its ideological proximity to the LPF, which was in government then, as well as the fact that few (contentious) bills were presented during that short parliamentary term. The Lijst Pim Fortuyn supported 98 per cent of legislation when it was in opposition (between 2003 and 2006). The governing coalition was mainly composed of the centre-right parties it governed with between 2002 and 2003 and their coalition agreement was quite similar to the agreement the LPF had signed in the previous term. D66 also scores very high. It supported on average 98 per cent of legislation during its two periods in opposition before the financial crisis (2002–2003 and 2006–2008). The centre-left cabinet that governed during 2006 and 2008 took a similar position on the left-right dimension as D66 did. The small Christian conservative SGP and the ChristianUnion, which has a slightly more centrist profile, were both always in opposition before 2008. These two parties supported 96 per cent of government legislation before 2008. They were more supportive of the Balkenende governments, which included the Christian-democratic party CDA, than of the Kok II government, which had quite a liberal agenda on moral issues, such as euthanasia. Next, we find the three core government parties: the social-democratic Labour Party supported on average 96 per cent of legislation when it faced centre-right governments from opposition; the Christian-democrats supported 95 per cent of legislation when it faced a Liberal-Labour government; the Liberal Party supported on average 94 per cent of legislation from the first two years of the centre-left Balkenende IV government. Below them, one could find four permanent opposition parties: the GreenLeft and the SP support 93 per cent and 90 per cent of legislation. Interestingly they are more supportive of legislation from governments including social-democrats (95 per cent and 90 per cent) compared with governments that do not include social-democrats (90 and 88 per cent). The ‘deep green’ PvdD and the radical right-wing populist PVV were in parliament for only two years before the crisis and support 90 per cent and 92 per cent legislation.3 All in all, we find that before the crisis no party in the Dutch parliament can be characterised as being a ‘radical’ opposition party that systematically rejects legislation. Within opposition parties we find a division between the CU, LN and SGP on the one hand, which are very supportive of legislation, even though they had never governed, and on the other hand opposition parties that have governed (PvdA, CDA, VVD, D66 and LPF), which appear slightly less supportive of legislation. Permanent opposition parties of the left (SP, PvdD, GL) and the right (PVV) tend to reject legislation more often, but even these parties support more than six out of seven government bills. In 2008, the global financial crisis hit the Netherlands. The point at which this global crisis became domestic can be pinpointed quite precisely: the nationalisation of Fortis, which was one of the largest banks of the Netherlands on September 28, 2008. This happened during the Balkenende IV

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centre-left majority coalition cabinet. The following period, however, was quite tempestuous in terms of coalition formation. After the Balkenende IV cabinet fell in 2010, all subsequent governments, the Rutte I and Rutte II governments, lacked a majority in at least one house of parliament. As both houses of parliament must approve legislation for it to be passed, this required some form of cooperation between coalition and opposition to ensure majorities for legislation. We find that the permanent opposition party SGP is most supportive of government legislation (on average 97 per cent): this is even higher than its support before the crisis. The Rutte I cabinet informally consulted the SGP in order to gain its support, which was necessary to get legislation passed in the Senate. It also signed a number of agreements with the Rutte II cabinet to ensure a majority for legislation in the Senate. These agreements are discussed in the last section of this chapter. The ChristianUnion, no longer a permanent opposition party after its period in government between 2006 and 2010, supported government legislation at the same level that it did before the crisis. Like the SGP, it signed several deals with the Rutte II government and supported the Rutte I government when it could not rely on its support party, the PVV, on some crucial issues. The CDA, which has been in opposition since 2012 for the first time in ten years, showed slightly higher levels of support compared with the period before the crisis. The extent to which D66 supported government legislation has decreased slightly (to 96 per cent). Like the CU and the SGP, D66 was involved in deals with the Rutte II government and supported the Rutte I government when the PVV would not. The Labour Party showed slightly less support for legislation as an opposition party than it had as a coalition party. Particularly notable for the Labour Party was the short period that the CDA and CU formed a minority government after the fall of the Balkenende IV government. The PvdA supported all legislation of this coalition. The extent to which GL, a permanent opposition party, supported the government legislation stayed the same. The GL struck deals with both the Rutte I and Rutte II government. Where it comes to the traditional government parties, the decline in support from the VVD is most notable: while before the crisis the VVD had supported the centre-left coalition in 94 per cent of the cases, after the onset of the crisis, this support dropped by 3 per cent. We find a marked decrease in support of government legislation for the SP, the PVV and the PvdD. The decrease is notable because the PVV was a supporting party of the CDAVVD minority cabinet between 2010 and 2012. The PVV supported 93 per cent of its bills; in the other periods, it supported only 84 per cent of bills. The PvdD decreases its support to on average 86 per cent. Among the more critical parties we can also note the pensioners’ party 50Plus. The expectation that permanent opposition parties would be less cooperative than in-and-out-of-government parties was not supported by the data. Among the permanent opposition parties, there were those that supported the

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government the most of all opposition parties (LN, SGP, CU before 2008), as well as the least (PvdD, PVV, SP). The in-and-out-of-government parties fell in-between these two categories. Clearly, it would be incorrect to treat all permanent opposition parties in the same way: there are more cooperative and more critical parties among their ranks. We find only a small effect of the global financial crisis on the willingness of opposition parties to support government bills, which decreased by about 2 per cent. Such a decline, however, occurs for only six out of ten parties. Most data supports the expectation but a number of cases (CDA, GL and SGP) form important exceptions. In line with the third expectation, we find that this decline is somewhat sharper for permanent opposition parties. They go down from 94 per cent support of legislation before the crisis to 90 per cent after the crisis. However, two of the five permanent opposition parties (GL and SGP) actually defy this expectation. One might speculate as to what sets GL and SGP apart from the PvdD, SP and PVV, as they are all permanent opposition parties, but the development in their behaviour is starkly different. In terms of their leftright position there are only small differences between GL, SP and PvdD and between SGP and PVV. A large difference does exist, however, in terms of the PvdD, SP and PVV all being strongly anti-elitist (Bakker et al. 2012) and the latter two (SP and PVV) are also clearly populist (Otjes and Louwerse 2015). Their opposition strategy is increasingly uncooperative. This fits the image of permanent ‘radical’ opposition parties. GL and the SGP are not standard ‘radical’ permanent opposition parties. Rather, their development in the last years implies that they have become more supportive of government. For the SGP, this fits with the principle ‘let the government govern’ without excessive parliamentary interference, which is both (1) part of their biblical ideology that the government has a divine right to govern and (2) its part of the Dutch historical tradition of consensus democracy (Lijphart 1968). In general, the SGP has chosen not to oppose the government but to behave cooperatively, in particular when Christian-democratic parties were part of the government. In the last years, the SGP, which has been excluded from consideration from cabinet participation not only due to its opposition to women’s suffrage,4 has become more mainstream by dropping, for instance, its ban on women’s membership. GreenLeft, formed as a coalition of left-wing parties, has become more mainstream and aspired explicitly to cooperate with the government (Lucardie and Voerman 2010: 220). Their cooperative behaviour can be seen as part of the normalisation of these two parties that so far have been excluded from government at the national level but are increasingly included in local and provincial governments. Earlier, the ChristianUnion had gone through a similar process of ‘normalisation,’ which had resulted in its government participation between 2007 and 2010. All in all, the division within the permanent opposition appears to be between parties that aspire to become part of the mainstream and those that explicitly seek to differentiate themselves from the elite.

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The opposition actors beyond the voting behaviour This section looks at the use of legislative tools, such as private member bills and amendments, and scrutiny tools, such as written and oral questions and motions. The expectations tested here are that permanent opposition parties will use legislative tools less often than other opposition parties and scrutiny tools more often than opposition parties. Moreover, we expect that after the onset of the global financial crisis, the use of legislative tools has declined, and the use of scrutiny tools has increased and finally that this effect is stronger for permanent opposition parties compared with others. First, we look at the use of legislative tools, namely amendments and legislative proposals written by opposition party MPs (private members’ bills). The underlying idea is that working on legislation is a sign of proactive and somehow also cooperative behaviour: opposition parties seek to find majorities for alternative policies. Private members’ bills are hardly ever used. On average an opposition MP introduces such a bill once every eight years, but some parties tend to propose many private members’ bills. Before the crisis, the PvdD, D66, PVV, GL, PvdA, VVD and SGP introduced more private members’ bills than average, around one per MP every five years. The other parties introduced fewer private members’ bills than the average. Permanent opposition parties are among both those that introduce most private members’ bills (PvdD, GL and PVV) and those that introduce the least (SP, CU and LN). On average, permanent opposition MPs introduce a private member bill every eight and a half years (0.12 bill per MP per year), compared with just below eight for opposition parties that have been in government (0.14 bill per MP per year). After the crisis, opposition MPs were slightly more likely to introduce legislation: from once every eight years, this has increased to just above once every seven years (0.14 bill per MP per year). This goes against the expectation. For six out of ten opposition parties, there is a (small) decline. There are increases in the willingness to introduce private members’ bills for the SP, the GL, SGP and CU. The first three of these parties are permanent opposition parties. MPs from permanent opposition now introduce private members’ bills once every seven years (0.14 bill per MP per year), compared with about once every nine years for former government parties (0.11 bill per MP per year). These patterns clearly contradict the expectation that after the onset of the global financial crisis opposition parties would be less inclined to propose legislation and that such a decline would be centred among permanent opposition parties. Not only is the number of private members’ bills small, most are not even put to a vote: of the 136 private members’ bills that were introduced in the research period, as of the winter of 2015, 46 per cent were still under discussion in the Tweede Kamer. After the introduction, MPs had not pushed the legislation further. Six per cent were withdrawn by the MP; 6 per cent were rejected by the Tweede Kamer; 7 per cent were under discussion in the Eerste

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Simon Otjes et al.

Kamer; 4 per cent were rejected by the Eerste Kamer; and only 30 per cent were accepted by both houses of parliament. Next, we look at amendments. Opposition parties introduce more amendments than government parties. Before the crisis an average opposition MP proposed more than six amendments per year. Before the crisis, the SGP and the CU were the champions in proposing amendments on a per-capita basis, followed by GL, D66, SP and LN. MPs belonging to the traditional three parties of government introduced fewer amendments than the average opposition party MP. The PVV and the LPF introduced far fewer amendments: about two amendments per MP per year. Permanent opposition parties introduced on average more then nine amendments per MP before the crisis. After the crisis, on average opposition party MPs were slightly more inclined to introduce amendments. Six opposition parties (all but two of which are permanent opposition parties) increased their use of amendments after the crisis, while PvdA, VVD, D66 (former government parties) and GL introduced more. All in all, this data contradicts three key expectations: permanent oppositions are not less likely to use legislative tools than opposition parties that have been in government. Rather, there are permanent opposition parties, such as GL and the SGP, which use such tools very often. Interestingly, these were the same opposition parties that as we saw above did not decrease their support for legislation. There are also permanent opposition parties (most prominently the PVV), which do not use such tools at all; the PVV also voted against legislation relatively often. The division between the parties that aspire to join the mainstream and spend time actually working on legislation and those that foster an anti-elite profile and neglect the legislative functions of parliament appears to be important here. In contradiction to the expectation, there was no decline in the use of such ‘cooperative’ tools by opposition parties after the global financial crisis. Rather, the use of such tools increased slightly. Next, we look at parliamentary questions (Table 4.4). MPs can ask questions during a weekly question hour (if the Speaker selects them) or they can send a written question to a minister. On average an opposition MP asked 1 oral question and 20 written questions per year in the years before the crisis. The PVV uses scrutiny tools very often: it scored second highest in oral questions and in written questions. It is bested by two parties that were in parliament only for short periods: the Party for the Animals asked more than 100 written questions per MP in the two years they were in parliament before the crisis (but no oral ones); LN was in parliament for such a short period that its few appearances, notably during the question hour, make quite an impact on our count. When we look at oral questions we then find the GL (with nearly 2 oral questions per year); it also scores above average with written questions. The SP is fourth in oral questions and third in written questions. We then find former government parties such as D66, VVD, LPF, PvdA and CDA. MPs of CU and SGP also use such tools less often than most MPs.

0.62 (1) 0.66 (3) 0.09 (0) –

–

2.68 (0)

LPF

PvdD

50Plus

LN

0.99 (1)

–

0.13 (2) 0.33 (1) 0.00 (0) –

0.35 (11) 0.14 (6) 0.05 (1) 1.18 (11) 1.61 (11) 1.29 (12) –

–

–

0.44 (4) 0.54 (2) 0.48 (1) –

0.56 (23) 0.28 (12) 0.08 (2) 1.57 (14) 0.86 (5) 2.05 (16) –

–

0.45 (17) 0.30 (13) 0.37 (10) 0.62 (10) 0.00 (0) 1.67 (13) 1.74 (6) 0.33 (2) 0 (0) 0.00 (0) 0.00 (0) –

III

–

0.17 (1) 1.00 (2) 0.50 (1) –

0.23 (8) 0.45 (19) 0.85 (19) 0.97 (24) 0.17 (8) 2.33 (16) 2.11 (19) –

IV

–

0.33 (2) 0.82 (2) 3.27 (7) –

0.27 (8) 0.47 (10) 0.63 (20) 1.31 (20) 0.33 (7) 0.65 (7) 0.20 (5) –

V

2.39 (12) 0.69 (1) 1.91 (4) 0.00 (0) –

1.17 (36) 1.15 (23) 0.50 (16) 2.14 (32) 2.39 (15) 2.35 (22) 0.90 (21) –

I

Rutte

0.83 (4) 1.08 (3) 1.62 (3) 1.39 (3) –

0.60 (23) 1.39 (18) 0.37 (15) 1.55 (23) 0.83 (27) 2.67 (11) 0.90 (13) –

II

16.1 (2)

–

1.24 (2) 13.02 (64) 10.41 (31) –

7.22 (317) 13.91 (413) 6.41 (239) 51.32 (266) 12.44 (170) 19.89 (218) –

II

Kok

7.93 (9)

–

0.38 (7) 0.99 (4) 1.18 (2) –

0.81 (25) 0.35 (15) 0.23 (6) 6.82 (61) 1.79 (12) 2.44 (22) –

I

–

–

9.35 (75) 18.51 (56) 26.97 (54) –

13.37 (562) 6.97 (307) 8.44 (236) 46.01 (414) 16.64 (100) 28.21 (226) –

II

Balkenende

–

10.37 (398) 6.08 (260) 6.69 (171) 28.85 (444) 29.76 (143) 22.13 (168) 21.60 (78) 2.3 (11) 7.56 (32) 29.36 (59) 31.74 (25) –

III

–

15.03 (90) 34.60 (69) 126.93 (254) –

13.37 (441) 12.61 (517) 19.56 (430) 32.69 (817) 61.55 (185) 32.42 (227) 54.86 (494) –

IV

Number of written questions per MP (per PPG)

–

26.52 (133) 36.01 (72) 77.75 (156) –

10.62 (319) 14.11 (218) 7.02 (296) 42.01 (630) 13.09 (131) 18.82 (188) 11.11 (267) –

V

35.59 (178) 37.19 (77) 71.04 (142) 6.76 (1) –

24.75 (758) 14.51 (296) 7.21 (229) 40.50 (608) 26.60 (270) 27.53 (264) 17.14 (400) –

I

Rutte

61.41 (307) 47.62 (143) 105.05 (210) 14.38 (29) –

32.32 (1260) 43.06 (560) 11.28 (462) 78.16 (1172) 41.66 (500) 89.51 (358) 44.58 (669) –

II

Notes: PPG = parliamentary party group. Governing parties in bold. Numbers in italics represent very limited number of questions when a party that is new to parliament asks questions during the short periods when a cabinet that has already submitted its resignation continues to govern after elections before a new cabinet is formed.

SGP

CU

PVV

GL

D66

SP

VVD

CDA

0.16 (7) 0.54 (16) 0.04 (2) 2.28 (12) 0.31 (4) 1.72 (19) –

PvdA

I

II

II

Balkenende

Kok

Number of oral questions per MP (per PPG)

Table 4.4 Parliamentary questions of all parties, per government (1998–2014)

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Simon Otjes et al.

All in all, permanent opposition parties are more likely to use scrutiny tools compared with opposition parties that have been in government. The SGP, however, forms a clear exception to this rule. The following expectation is that the use of such tools increased markedly during the economic crisis. On average MPs ask more oral questions; the number of written questions even doubles. Seven out of ten parties increase the number of written questions: it decreases for VVD, the SP and the PVV. Only two parties decrease their number of oral questions: the PvdD and the PVV. The former still scores more than double the average number of questions per opposition MP. For the latter this period includes its stint as a support party for a minority government; were we to exclude this period, the number of written questions would go down by only two per MP per year. All in all, the expectation that MPs ask more questions after the global financial crisis is supported by the data. Permanent opposition parties do not ask more questions after the onset of the economic crisis: for oral questions the number of questions asked by MPs from parties that have never governed stays almost identical, while there is a marked increase for opposition parties with a government track record. There is an increase in the use of written questions for both groups, but in relative and absolute terms the increase is greater for opposition parties that have governed. We note, however, that permanent opposition parties were more active overall: they display the highest use of scrutiny tools, before and after the crisis. Finally, we turn our attention to motions (Table 4.5). Motions (called resolutions in some other legislatures) are non-binding expressions of the opinion of parliament. They are used quite often by Dutch MPs, for instance, to censure ministers, to express opinions about issues and to shape government policy. When proposing new legislation, ministers often refer to adopted motions to justify why they introduce new regulations (Visscher 1994: 118). Before the crisis an average opposition MP proposed 24 motions. In the short period the PvdD was in parliament before the economic crisis, it proposed on average almost 90 motions per MP per year. They are followed in numbers by LN, D66 and the SGP, then GL and CU, SP and SGP. At the low end of the scale we find the core government parties when in opposition as well as the LPF. After the onset of the crisis the number of motions has nearly doubled. The use of motions, however, has increased for only five parties: the ChristianUnion now proposes the most motions per MP per year, followed closely by the GL. Both have more than doubled their use of motions. The CDA has quintupled the average number of motions per MP per year. The PvdA and the SP have also increased number of motions. We find decreases for the PvdD, SGP, D66, the PVV and the VVD. Were one to exclude the period the PVV was a support party, the average number of motions per its MP per year would increase very slightly. Permanent opposition parties increase their use of motions (an average increase of only three motions). At the same time opposition parties who have governed, more than double the number of motions per MP per year.

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Table 4.5 Motions of all parties, per government (1998–2014) Number of motions per MP (per PPG) Kok

Balkenende

II

I

II

III

IV

V

I

II

7.37 (324) 10.74 (319) 6.04 (226) 32.78 (170) 21.23 (290) 27.60 (302) –

13.36 (410) 5.61 (243) 8.25 (211) 32.68 (294) 45.49 (300) 43.31 (398) –

12.54 (527) 6.79 (299) 10.56 (296) 33.85 (305) 42.54 (255) 51.12 (409) –

14.32 (682) 41.40 (149) 79.73 (159) –

28.53 (38) 46.55 (140) 64.85 (130) –

11.83 (390) 8.82 (362) 18.90 (416) 21.07 (527) 73.64 (221) 53.66 (376) 36.41 (328) –

8.24 (247) 8.18 (172) 6.02 (187) 19.53 (293) 7.86 (79) 22.59 (226) 4.77 (114) –

16.04 (491) 10.44 (213) 4.83 (153) 27.75 (416) 32.78 (332) 41.62 (399) 7.49 (175) –

18.41 (718) 51.37 (668) 8.14 (334) 63.42 (951) 64.93 (779) 156.30 (625) 38.83 (582) –

PvdD

6.19 (23) 33.92 (168) 48.71 (144) –

50Plus

–

–

–

11.08 (425) 7.23 (309) 10.48 (268) 21.33 (328) 47.28 (227) 44.69 (340) 18.96 (68) 16.53 (36) 32.87 (138) 76.97 (154) 97.20 (78) –

40.98 (246) 55.06 (110) 72.87 (146) –

26.19 (131) 29.46 (59) 44.19 (88) –

LN

64.41 (6)

93.23 (111)

–

–

–

–

56.83 (284) 50.13 (104) 53.82 (108) 0.00 (0) –

114.56 (573) 67.56 (203) 123.14 (246) 52.41 (105) –

PvdA CDA VVD SP D66 GL PVV LPF CU SGP

Rutte

Notes: Governing parties in bold. Numbers in italics represent very limited number of motions when a party that is new to parliament introduces motions during the short periods when a cabinet that has already submitted its resignation continues to govern after elections before a new cabinet is formed.

This section tested four ideas. First, permanent opposition parties were less likely to use constructive tools compared with opposition parties that have governed. This is not the case, on average; for the entire period, permanent opposition parties proposed one private member bill every eight years, while opposition parties that have governed introduce one every nine years; the first group proposes eight amendments per year, while the second group proposes five amendments per year. The second notion was that permanent opposition parties used scrutiny tools more. This is indeed the case: they propose twice as many motions and propose 70 per cent more oral questions and 50 per cent

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Simon Otjes et al.

more written questions. The third expectation is that the political culture would be more adversarial after the crisis than before. While we can see an increase in the number motions and oral and written questions, we also find an increase in the number of amendments and private members’ bills: that is, a proactive behaviour and possibly also a sign of a willingness to cooperate. The final expectation held that such increase would be more marked for permanent opposition parties. This is not the case: rather it is opposition parties that have been in government that increase the number of motions and oral and written questions, while the numbers remain more stable for permanent opposition parties.

Experimenting with minority government In this section, we examine opposition activity not expressed in motions, amendments, votes or parliamentary questions. In minority government situations, opposition parties have bargaining power over the government. Opposition parties mostly support government policies and bills, and they even may help prevent that government ministers must resign when facing motions of no confidence (Otjes and Louwerse 2014). But in Dutch parliamentary practice, deals struck between minority governments and opposition parties are quite exceptional. We look at the eight agreements the Liberal-Labour minority coalition negotiated to secure majorities in the Senate for austerity measures and welfare state reforms. These are listed in Table 4.6. The Rutte II cabinet was formed in the fall of 2012 without a majority in the Eerste Kamer, which holds a full veto over all legislation. It had an ambitious Table 4.6 Policy agreements between coalition and opposition (2012–2015) Agreements

D66

CU

SGP

GL

CDA

50Plus

PvdD

PVV

SP

Housing Agreement 2014 Budget Pension Agreement Welfare Bill Care Bill Student Grant Agreement 2015 Budget 2016 Tax Plan

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

1 11

1 11

1 11

0.96 0

0.96 0

0.88 0

0.76 0

0.84 0

0.92 0

1 1 1

1 1 0

1 1 0

0 0 1

12 12 0

0 12 12

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0

1 11

1 0

1 0

0.95 0

0.95 12

0.77 0

0.82 0

0.82 0

0.91 0

Notes: Share of budget bills supported for 2014 and 2015 budgets. 1 Only supported the bill in the Eerste Kamer, not in the Tweede Kamer. 2 Voted in favour without participating in backroom talks.

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austerity agenda and initially thought, based on assurances by the chair of the Eerste Kamer, that the Senate would not be a major obstacle in realising these goals. But already in the first months of the cabinet, the opposition parties, CU, D66 and SGP, proposed a number of alterations to the government plans on the housing market. The coalition and the opposition parties entered in negotiations and presented an agreement on housing policy. This was the first of a series of agreements between the coalition parties and opposition parties. After this agreement, the government invited the GL and D66 to talk about reforms of student and child grant systems. These talks failed. Despite not being assured of a majority, in the Senate the government then decided to introduce a number of pieces of legislation without consulting the opposition: this led to tense negotiations about the 2014 budget and a pension bill. After these were introduced, it became clear that they would not obtain a legislative majority in the Senate. The government responded by inviting all opposition parties to the negotiating table. In both cases, only the SGP, CU and D66 stayed and the cabinet developed a working relationship with these parties, consulting them on issues and inviting them on negotiations on major reforms in social security and long-term health care. This gave SGP, CU and D66 the nickname the ‘Constructive Three’ (C3). The three parties helped the government obtain a majority for these bills, while the CDA (and for the care bill the pensioners’ party 50Plus) also voted in favour but without participating in talks (as we saw, the usual pattern of opposition party behaviour in legislative decision making is to vote in favour without being consulted). Talks about the student grant system with D66 and GL were reopened, resulting in an agreement. D66 and GreenLeft also participated in talks on the reform of the provincial government structure, but these failed. The cabinet reached a deal with D66, CU and SGP about the 2015 budget. The cabinet then had only one major issue left: tax reform. They talked with opposition parties in the first half of 2015 but no deal was struck. They introduced a tax plan without ensuring support of opposition parties. Of the opposition parties, only the CDA voted in favour (they had indicated that they would support the tax plan but were opposed to talks); the government then courted D66 in the Eerste Kamer to ensure a majority for their tax plans, which eventually succeeded. These deals negotiated between the coalition and opposition parties clearly contradict the idea that during the economic crisis opposition parties would become more antagonistic. On the contrary, the combination of an economic crisis with a government in a minority situation led to strong cooperation between the government and opposition parties. Although the agreements between the coalition and the opposition were new, they did fit into a larger consensual political tradition of Dutch politics. In these cases, opposition influence of legislation was not limited to formal amendments but involved a more fundamental give and take resulting from their increased bargaining power. The cooperative behaviour of D66, CU and SGP and to a lesser extent GL contradicts the idea that the crisis exacerbated antagonism in parliament. Two

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of these parties are permanent opposition parties, their cooperation does not support the idea that permanent opposition parties are less cooperative than opposition parties that have been in government. These four parties showed above average support of legislation (except for GL before 2008). They also showed other signs of cooperative behaviour proposing more amendments than average and more private members’ bills than average (except for the CU before 2008). The two permanent opposition parties GL and SGP are (again) specifically notable. As discussed above, their cooperative behaviour can be seen as part of the mainstreaming of these two parties, which at the national level so far have been excluded from government. There are also substantive grounds for cooperation: D66, CU and SGP have relatively centrist economic ideologies and actually could be placed in-between the PvdA and the VVD on the economic left-right dimension. As discussed above, the SGP’s biblical ideology (which the CU shares) includes the notion that the government has a divine right to govern without excessive parliamentary interference. Therefore these parties have historically tended to be more cooperative. Except for the strategic choice of parties, there are also cultural factors at play. As we saw, before and after the global financial crisis, opposition parties supported a large share of legislation: even the most outspoken opposition party still supported six out of seven government bills. The exceptionally high rates of support tie in with a Dutch tradition of consensus democracy where legislating is an almost depoliticised process (Andeweg and Irwin 2009; Eppink 2003). As Lijphart (1968: 121) described it, politics in the Netherlands has been business-like with an emphasis on getting things done. In this case backroom meetings between political leaders of government and opposition parties played a crucial role: secrecy and summit diplomacy, where leaders of opposition and government parties meet to discuss major issues and cobble out agreements, are historically part of Dutch consensus democracy. Moreover, political cooperation between parliamentary specialists laid the basis for many of these agreements: in the committees of the Dutch working parliament, specialists of coalition and opposition parties have met to work on common interest, with the division between coalition and opposition becoming less relevant (Andeweg 2013). While some authors have argued that these consensus rules have waxed and waned over time (Daalder 1974; Pennings and Keman 2008; Van Praag 1993; Lijphart 1989), these informal institutions certainly were visible here. Still, these norms are no longer as all-pervasive as they used to be. While the CU, D66 and SGP clearly subscribe to these rules, other opposition parties abstained completely from cooperation: the PvdD, PVV and SP have not signed a deal with the government, nor did they vote in favour of any of these more controversial reforms. These also are the parties that voted more often against legislation, in particular after the outbreak of the crisis in 2008. These parties also make frequent use of scrutiny tools such as parliamentary questions (although this has decreased quite a bit for the PVV after its period as a support

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party). These parties come closest to the model of an uncompromising, uncooperative and scrutiny-oriented opposition party. For this reason, in this analysis of Dutch opposition behaviour between 1998 and 2015 we may distinguish between a ‘responsible opposition’ that enables the continuity of government by negotiating deals, and a ‘responsive opposition’ that primarily aims to voice the constituent’s views (Mair 2011). While this expressive politics in scrutiny activity is well visible, even these more responsive opposition parties still allow the government to reach a majority in most legislative voting. In this sense, in the Netherlands, they maintain an important level of responsibility.

Conclusions This chapter examined the nature of opposition in the Netherlands. We can summarise the results with three general conclusions. First, consensus trumps all other patterns. The strength of consensus can be seen in voting patterns on legislation: in general opposition parties support 93 per cent of government bills. Even the least supportive opposition party still supported 80 per cent of legislation. These voting patterns were part of a tradition of consensus: this also includes a pragmatic political style, cooperation between specialists and a willingness to strike deals behind closed doors. When what was in effect a minority government needed the support of opposition parties for far-reaching austerity and reform packages after the global financial crisis, these institutions were activated: it allowed coalition and opposition parties to strike deals on specific reforms. The tradition of consensus thus trumped the possibility of more antagonistic politics after the onset of the economic crisis. The rules of consensus democracies allowed for cooperation between coalition and opposition, in particular when it was more necessary due to the minority status of the government. Second, permanent opposition breeds diversity. One of the guiding expectations of this study was that permanent opposition parties would be more antagonistic, more inclined to use scrutiny tools and less inclined to cooperate with the government. We found that within the group of permanent opposition parties, there are two streams: on the one hand, there are the Socialist Party, the Freedom Party and the Party for the Animals. These represent the ‘radical’ opposition parties in the Netherlands, which reject legislation more than other parties, tend to ask parliamentary questions, use cooperative tools less than other parties and are unwilling to strike policy deals with the government. On the other hand, there are the Political Reformed Party and the GreenLeft. These parties tend to vote in favour of legislation, propose alternatives in the form of amendments and private members’ bills and are willing to strike deals with the government. D66 and the ChristianUnion, which have been in government, share a very similar political style. Third, after the crisis previously passive opposition parties appear to have awakened. The PvdA, CDA and VVD had been in government often before

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their tenures in opposition we observed here. Those parties tended to be more passive opposition parties. They did not vote against legislation often, but they also proposed a limited number of amendments, parliamentary questions and motions. After the financial crisis, these parties became more active: the VVD in particular voted against legislation more often; the CDA in particular became more active in proposing amendments; the PvdA and the CDA asked more parliamentary questions and used more motions. One can question whether it was the crisis that caused them to become more active. Rather the activities of these parties may have increased over time (Bakema 1988), independently of the circumstances. All in all, the Dutch consensus democracy found a way to deal with minority government, building further on the already existing rules of the game that characterised this consensus democracy. A number of opposition parties, including two parties that had never governed before, increased the extent to which they voted in favour of legislation during the crisis; overall opposition parties were also more likely to try to find majorities for alternative policies (in the form of amendments and bills); during the Rutte II, in office since the fall of 2012, eight separate policy agreements were made between coalition and opposition parties that had not governed before. This article thus has shown that the economic crisis not only exacerbates confrontation in parliament, but also may lead parties to collaborate if opposition parties can obtain gains from a strengthened bargaining position.

Notes 1 The quote is from Mariëtte Hamer, at the time one of the longest sitting Dutch MPs. Cited in: Besselink, N. and K. Zandbergen (2014) “Sinds Fortuyn is het hectisch”, Trouw, July 5, 2014. 2 This means that we have had to split the data for the fourth cabinet Balkenende in a before and after crisis period. We do not present this data separately in the tables. 3 The difference between the Kok II cabinet (before the entry of the LPF) and the first threeand-a-half Balkenende cabinets is small. Of the parties that were in opposition during both these periods, the support levels of the SP and the CU hardly change, while the GL was less supportive (94% to 92%) and the SGP was more supportive (94 to 98%) during Balkenende cabinets. These changes can better be explained by the changing ideological composition of the cabinets than a reaction to the oppositional style of the populist parties LPF and the LN, which show no sign of being ‘radical’ opposition in their voting. 4 The SGP’s position on women’s suffrage was for instance the reason that in 2003 the CDA and VVD opted to form a coalition with D66 instead of relying on the CU and SGP.

References Andeweg, R.B. (2011). Purple Puzzles: The 1994 and 1998 Government Formations in the Netherlands and Coalition Theory. In R.B. Andeweg, L. De Winter, & P. Dumont (eds.) Puzzles of Government Formation: Coalition Theory and Deviant Cases (pp. 147–164). Abingdon: Routledge. Andeweg, R.B. (2013). Parties in Parliament: The Blurring of Opposition. In W.C. Müller & H.M. Narud (eds.) Party Governance and Party Democracy. New York: Springer.

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Andeweg, R.B., De Winter, L., & Müller, W.C. (2008). Parliamentary Opposition in PostConsociational Democracies: Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 14(1), 77–112. Andeweg, R.B., & Irwin, G.A. (2009). Governance and Politics of the Netherlands (3rd rev.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bakema, W. (1988). Het feitelijk gebruik van parlementaire rechten. In Werkboek staatkunde (pp. 228–245). Alphen aan den Rijn: Samsom. Bakker, R., De Vries, C., Edwards, E., Hooghe, L., Jolly, S., Marks, G., Polk, J., Rovny, J., Steenbergen, M. and Vachudova, M. A. (2012). Measuring Party Positions in Europe: The Chapel Hill Expert Survey Trend File, 1999–2010. Party Politics, 21(1), 143–152. Daalder, H. (1966). The Netherlands: Opposition in a Segmented Society. In R. A. Dahl (ed.) Political Opposition in Western Democracies (pp. 188–236). New Haven: Yale University Press. Daalder, H. (1974). Politisering en Lijdelijkheid in de Nederlandse Politiek. Assen: Van Gorcum. Eppink, D.J. (2003). Vreemde Buren. Amsterdam: Contact. Lijphart, A. (1968). The Politics of Accommodation: Pluarlism and Democracy in the Netherlands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lijphart, A. (1989). From the Politics of Accomodation to Adversarial Politics in the Netherlands: A Reassessment. In H. Daalder & G.A. Irwin (eds.) Politics in the Netherlands: How Much Change? London: Cass. Louwerse, T., Otjes, S., & Van Vonno, C.M.C. (2018). The Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset Acta Politica, 53(1), 149–166. Louwerse, T., Otjes, S., Willumsen, D., & Öhberg, P. (2017). Reaching across the Aisle: Explaining Government-Opposition Voting in Parliament. Party Politics, 23(6), 746–759. Lucardie, P., & Voerman, G. (2010). De toekomst van GroenLinks. In P. Lucardie & G. Voerman (eds.) Van de straat naar de staat? GroenLinks, 1990–2010. Amsterdam: Boom. Mair, P. (2011). Bini Smaghi vs. the Parties: Representative Government and Institutional Constraints (No. RSCAS 2011/22). Otjes, S. (2011). The Fortuyn Effect Revisited: How Did the LPF Affect the Dutch Parliamentary Party System? Acta Politica, 46(4), 400–424. Otjes. S., & Louwerse, T. (2014). A Special Majority Cabinet? Supported Minority Governance and Parliamentary Behavior in the Netherlands. World Political Science Review, 10. Otjes, S., & Louwerse, T. (2015). Populists in Parliament: Comparing Left-Wing and RightWing Populism in the Netherlands. Political Studies, 63(1), 60–79. Pennings, P., & Keman, H. (2008). The Changing Landscape of Dutch Politics since the 1970s: A Comparative Exploration. Acta Politica, 43. Timmermans, A., & Breeman, G. (2010). Politieke waarheid en dynamiek van de agenda in coalitiekabinetten. In C. van Baalen, W. Breedveld, M. Leenders, J. van Merriënboer, J. Ramakers & J. Turpijn (eds.) Jaarboek Parlementaire Geschiedenis 2010 (pp. 47–62). Amsterdam: Boom. Van Praag, P. (1993). Hoe Uniek Is de Nederlandse Consensusdemocratie? In U. Becker (ed.) Nederlandse Politiek in Historisch en Vergelijkend Perspectief (pp. 151–178). Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Visscher, G. (1994). Parlementaire invloed op wetgeving: inventarisatie en analyse van de invloed van de beide Kamers der Staten-Generaal op de wetgevende activiteiten van de kabinetten-Marijnen tot en met-Lubbers I. Den Haag: SDU.

5

Italy When responsibility fails. Parliamentary opposition in times of crisis Francesco Marangoni and Luca Verzichelli

Introduction The objective of this chapter is to investigate the recent transformation of parliamentary opposition in Italy. We move from a general observation which is much inspired by Peter Mair’s comparative work on the troublesome evolution of the European party democracy (2013): the Italian parties that have been involved in government during the past decades have lost most of their popular support. They have become more and more disconnected from the society, with their traditional electorate becoming much more vulnerable, disloyal and somehow inclined to desert the vote. On the contrary, new political actors (or even old secondary and extremist parties, once confined to a very minor role within the democratic party systems) have had the chance to gain electoral support and to represent significant shares of voters, without challenging the mainstream parties in the field of responsibility, but overwhelming them in terms of responsiveness. As happened elsewhere, parties in governments at the time of the emergence of the crisis have not been confirmed after the elections held in 2013, and all the other elements of change noticed by the comparative analyses focusing on the effects of the crisis in the most problematic systems (for instance, Bosco and Verney 2012) are easily identifiable: increase of voters’ abstention and an ever-increasing party fragmentation, somehow due to the emergence of the new (radical and populist) political forces. In this regard, the Italian case can be conceived as a paradigmatic one: the two coalitions which had alternated in government for nearly two decades lost about four million votes, while a new political force without any previous parliamentary experience, the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement, M5S), reached about 25 per cent of the preferences. One should probably get back to the crisis of the Prodi II government, less than two years after the centre-left victory of 2006, to mark the first sign of instability of the bipolar system, which emerged in the mid-nineties. Subsequently, the early elections of 2008 gave the illusion of a new stabilisation of a bipolar party system, reducing the parliamentary scenario to a quasi-two-party

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system: the centre-right camp was in fact dominated by the new Berlusconi cartel, which had anyway lost its strongly pro-Europeanist component of the Unione di Centro (Centrist Union, Udc), while the centre-left opposition was almost entirely represented by the new-born Democratic Party (Pd), given that the radical post-communist cartel failed to enter the parliament. A few months later, it was clear that such a simplification could not last, due to a number of internal struggles within the two largest parties. The cabinet formed after that election, the Berlusconi IV government, surely represented an example of organic party government, counting on a strong electoral legitimacy and on a clear majority in both the chambers, achieved by a simple coalition composed of the Popolo delle Libertà (People of Liberty, Pdl) and the small Lega Nord (Northern League, Ln). However, the decline of the leadership of Berlusconi and his personal problems somehow anticipated the effects of the economic crisis (Fusaro 2013). As a matter of fact, when the Berlusconi IV government resigned, at the end of 2011, and the technocratic government of Mario Monti was formed – another peculiar outcome of the institutional development in Italy (McDonnell and Valbruzzi 2014; Marangoni and Verzichelli 2015) – the most Eurosceptical components of the centre-right coalition refused their support to the new executive. The unexpected results of the already mentioned 2013 elections, and the consequent tormented process of government formation represent new enormous difficulties for the stabilisation of an adversarial model of executive-legislative relations. It is worth remembering here the uncertainty following the establishment of the new legislature: thanks to the majority bonus offered by the mixed – proportional electoral system (which would have been soon cancelled by a pronouncement of the Constitutional Court) the centre-left coalition led by the Democratic Party had a robust majority at the lower chamber, but there was no way to form a majority within the Senate, apart from a convergence of two of the three largest actors (the Democratic Party on the left, the People of Liberty on the right and the Five Star Movement). The Letta government, formed after a long phase of bargaining, was therefore a sort of Große Koalition supported by the moderate parties from the two traditional cartels (but not from the extreme right and the radical left parties, which had been electorally connected to them) and from the small centrist cartel led by the “new” political leader, Mario Monti. When Berlusconi decided to withdraw his support to Letta, another split in his party made the survival of the government possible. The new majority could be therefore defined as a Kleine-Große Koalition, supported by the Democratic Party, the centrist cartel and a new parliamentary party called Nuovo Centro Destra (New-Centre-Right, Ncd), formed by a few dozens of MPs led by the former general secretary of Forza Italia, Angelino Alfano. This is nearly the same coalition supporting the government formed by Renzi a few months later, after his “conquest” of the leadership of the Pd. However, since then, the mobility of the party system has not ceased: small splits and party mergers, as well as a lot of individual episodes of switching

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from one party group to another, deeply affected the functioning of the Italian parliamentary democracy. For the illustrative purposes of this chapter, we have summarised the sequence of the main actors populating the Italian parliamentary scene in the period between 1996 and the end of 2016, offering a comprehensive illustration of parliamentary parties (Table 5.1) and majority and opposition composition (Table 5.2). Hence, the Italian political system can be seen with no doubt as an interesting case in point to study the recent transformation of parliamentary opposition. Indeed, the general propositions raised by Ilonszki and De Giorgi in the introduction of this volume can be easily applicable to this case: the global economic crisis would have determined a possible convergence among the parties of the two traditionally opposing coalitions, to find a common ground of policy priorities. At the same time, the effects of the same crisis could have accentuated the distance between the parties, with a more pronounced familiarity to governmental responsibility and those oriented to attract the growing populist and anti-systemic demands. However, the events following the end of the Berlusconi IV government in 2011 show that the Italian case presents also some country-specific elements to be taken into account, from the emergence of a “technocratic government” supported by a bipartisan (but not fully symmetrical) majority, to the atypical coalitions supporting the three following governments, Letta, Renzi and Gentiloni. Therefore, in addressing the study of parliamentary opposition in Italy, a few questions need to be reformulated: first of all, was the “opposition mode” of the two (left and right) coalitions alternating in government until 2011 comparable in terms of cohesion and consensus? Secondly, did the emergence of a technocratic executive change the overall pattern of parliamentary opposition? Thirdly, what happened once the new populist parties were institutionally represented in parliament? In particular, did the new M5S parliamentary group really distinguish itself from the other opposition parties? Consistently with the theoretical framework offered in this volume, we will try to answer these questions, moving from a careful analysis of what happened to the parliamentary opposition during the previous decade. As said already, our general proposition assumes that internal factors (mainly the instability of the party system and the important change in all the party actors) and exogenous ones (mainly, the global economic crisis) should have worked together determining an interruption in the dynamic of change of parliamentary democracy which had been somehow interpreted as the prospective transformation from a consociational model to a competitive one (Fabbrini 2013; De Giorgi 2015) and a sort of partial abdication of the main political actors (Marangoni and Verzichelli 2015). Accordingly to the research strategy at the core of this volume, data on behaviours and strategic orientations of opposition parties will be presented and analysed in depth, to understand long-term tendencies and even occasional changes. We argue that although a clear polarisation between “mainstream

Federazione dei Verdi Lega Nord

Partito democratico di Sinistra Democratici di Sinistra Rifondazione Comunista Forza Italia Alleanza Nazionale

Centro Cristiano Democratico Partito Popolare Italiano Rinnovamento Italiano Partito dei Comunisti Italiani Unione democratica repubblicana Democrazia e Libertà (Margherita) Unione di Centro Popolo delle Libertà Partito Democratico

Fdv Ln

Pds Ds Rc Fi An

Ccd Ppi Ri PdCi Ud(eu)r

Udc Pdl Pd

Dl

National language name

Name abbreviation

Christian Democratic Centre Italian People’s Party Italian Renewal Italian Communists Democratic and Republican Union Democracy and Freedom (the Daisy) Union of Centre People of Freedoms Democratic Party

Democratic Left Party, Left Democrats Communist Refoundation Italy Ahead National Alliance

Federation of Greens Northern League

English name

Table 5.1 Political parties in the Italian parliament (1996–2017)

Christian democrat Right liberal Social-democrat

Christian democrat

Communist Right liberal Extr. right Æ Conservative Christian democrat Christian democrat Left liberal Communist Christian democrat

Greens Regionalist ÆExtr. right Socialist

Party family

2001 2008 2008

2001

1994 1994 1996 1998 1998

1992 1998 1992 1994 1994

1987 1992

First entry into parliament

1.8–6.7 21.6–37.4 25.4–33.2

10.7–14.5

3.2–5.8 6.8–11.4 4.3–4. 1.7–2.3 1.3–1.4

16.1–21.1 16.6–17.5 3.7–8.5 20.6–29.4 12.0–15.6

1.8–2.5 4.1–10.1

Party stability (electoral support range)

In and out of government In and out of government In and out of government

In and out of government

In and out of government In and out of government In government once In and out of government In and out of government

In government once In and out of government In and out of government

In and out of government

In government once In and out of government

Experience in government

Idv M5S FdI Sel Sc Ci Ncd Ap CR SI Ala

Italia dei valori Movimento Cinque Stelle Fratelli di Italia Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà Scelta Civica Civici e Innovatori Nuovo Centro Destra Area Popolare Conservatori e Riformisti Sinistra Italiana Alleanza Liberale Autonomie

Italy of Values Five Star Movement Brothers of Italy Left, Environment and Liberty Civic Choice Civic and Innovators New Centre-Right Popular Area Conservatives and Reformists Italian Left Liberal Alliance

Left liberal Populist Extr. right Extr. left Left liberal Left liberal Christian democrat Christian democrat Conservative Extr. left Right liberal

2008 2013 2013 2013 2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2016 2016

2.3–4.4 25.1 2.0 3.2 8.3 ND ND ND ND ND ND

In government once Never in government Never in government Never in government In government once Never in government In government once In government once Never in government Never in government Never in government

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Table 5.2 Government and opposition composition (1996–2017) Prime Minister (PM’s Party)

Type of government

Government parties

Opposition parties

1996–1998

Prodi I (Uilvo Coalition)

Multiparty minority

Fi, An, Ln, Ccd

1998–2000

D’Alema I_II (Ds)

Minimal winning coalition

2000–2001

Amato II (Ds)

Minimal winning coalition

2001–2006

Berlusconi II_III (Fi)

Surplus coalition

2006–2008

Prodi II (Centreleft coalition)

Minimal winning coalition

2008–2011 2011–2013

Berlusconi IV (Fi) Monti

Minimal winning coalition Technocratic Cabinet

Pds, Ppi, FdV, RI, Sdi + smaller parties Ds, Ppi, Udr, PdCI, IdV, RI, Sdi + smaller parties Ds, Ppi, Dem, Udeur, PdCI, Idv, Ri, Sdi Fi, An, LN, Udc + other smaller parties Ds, Dl, Prc, FdV, PdCI, RnP, IdV, Udeur, + smaller parties PdL, Ln, MpA

Ln, Idv

2013–2014

Letta (Pd)

Surplus coalition

2014–2016

Renzi (Pd)

Minimal winning coalition

2017–

Gentiloni (Pd)

Minimal winning coalition

External support: PdL, PD, UDC, FLI, + smaller parties Pd, Sc, Udc, Pdl (only Ncd from 26/11/2013) + smaller parties Pd, Ncd, Udc, Sc, + other smaller parties Pd, Ap/Ncd, Ci, Udc, + other smaller parties

Fi, An, Ln, Ccd, Rc Fi, An, Ln, Ccd, Rc Ds, Dl, Rc An, Fi, Ln, Udc Pd, Idv, Udc

M5s, Sel, Ln, Fdi, FI (from 26/11/2013) M5s, Fi, Sel/ Si, Ln, Cr, Fdi M5s, Fi, Si,, Ln, Ala-Sc, Cr, FdI, Al, P

governing parties” and new “populist oppositions” is indisputable, a number of factors have worked against the consolidation of a clear divide between old and new parties: in particular, we believe that after a phase of increasing strengthening of the executive institution, in terms of steering capabilities over the lawmaking processes (Marangoni 2013) and “presidentialisation of parliamentary government” (Pogunkte and Webb 2005), some sort of contradictory trends emerged. The presidentialisation of the parliamentary government appeared very much “Italian style” (Calise 2005) due to the conditions imposed by the compound party system and, to a certain extent, to the influence of other institutional actors, like the President of the Republic and the Italian Central

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Bank (Verzichelli 2003). As a result, the systemic uncertainties and the lack of a stable leadership would have determined a decreasing responsibility in all the political actors, leading to the abdication of some of the typical functions of the party government model. The lack of responsibility of the governmental actors, in turn, has a clear effect on the strategies of the other responsive parties, whose political perspectives are entirely grounded on the capability to stress the inadequacy of their competitors. To shed a light on this mutual decrease of responsibility and responsiveness, we will explore the factors determining different possible outcomes in the behaviour of the Italian opposition parties. The law-making battlefield and in particular the passage of the governmental bills will be the first level of analysis where we aim to test our arguments. After that, we will look to the evolution of a broader system of parliamentary confrontation, focussing on the peculiarities and the “noises” in the Italian parliamentary democracy that emerged in the past few years. A conclusive section will resume our implications in a comparative and diachronic perspective.

The opposition’s behaviour in the law-making process Let’s have a look to the legislative behaviour of the opposition parliamentary groups (only lower chamber) during the final passage of the laws produced between 1996 and the end of 2016.1 The dataset we have built includes 2699 votes by the parliamentary groups representing the parliamentary oppositions during this period. Following De Giorgi and Marangoni (2015) we have calculated an index of consensus: Consxi = YESxi + ABSxi /TOTxi , where Consxi is the index of consensus of group x for law i and is equal to the ratio between the sum of ayes (YESxi) and abstentions (ABSxi). The index goes from 0 = if all the MPs of group x vote nays to the bill or do not participate in the vote, to 1 = if all the members of group x were present and either voted aye or abstained. Table 5.3 shows the mean values of the index by opposition group and legislative term. At a first glance, the voting behaviour of the opposition groups seems to be quite inconsistent (not following a clear and common pattern during time and across parties), with the exception of the last legislative term we consider (started on April 2013), when the main divide on economic and financial measures has been between the pro-European “core parties” from both centre-right and centre-left and the oppositions from the radical left, radical right and M5S, and the behaviour of these latter groups appears to be more uniform. Two main caveats have to be considered in this regard: first of all the succeeding legislative terms have been characterised by very different situations: the XIV and XV legislative terms have been in fact characterised by

0,28 (0,27) – 0,19 (0,28) 0,34 (0,28) – – – 0,28 (0,25) – – 0,73 (0,13) – 0,80 (0,09) – – 0,90 (0,12) 0,27 (0,27)

0,32 (0,26) – 0,22 (0,23) 0,34 (0,26) – – – – – – 0,70 (0,13) – 0,81 (0,09) – – – 0,29 (0,25)

D’Alema I_II

Note: Parties in (or supporting) government in bold.

An Fdi Ln Fi Pdl Fli Ncd Ccd-Cdu/Udc Sc M5s Ppi L’Ulivo/Pd Pds/ds Idv Sel Rc Tot.

Prodi I 0,36 (0,24) – 0,26 (0,21) 0,39 (0,22) – – – – – – 0,83 (0,13) – 0,85 (0,08) – – 0,66 (0,17) 0,34 (0,23)

Amato II 0,71 (0,14) – 0,74 (0,16) 0,80 (0,09) – – – 0,74 (0,17) – – 0,33 (0,32) – 0,37 (0,35) – – 0,17 (0,28) 0,29 (0,33)

Berlusconi II_III 0,31 (0,35) – 0,21 (0,36) 0,34 (0,38) – – – 0,32 (0,36) – – – 0,78 (0,09) – 0,24 (0,36) – 0,77 (0,14) 0,30 (0,36)

Prodi II 0,90 (0,29) – 0,84 (0,28) – 0,86 (0,27) – – 0,40 (0,39) – – – 0,33 (0,40) – 0,00 (0,00) – – 0,33 (0,39)

Berlusconi IV – – 0,23 (0,38) – 0,64 (0,00) 0,72 (0,11) – 0,65 (0,09) – – – 0,88 (0,06) – 0,30 (0,40) – – 0,27 (0,40)

Monti

Table 5.3 Index of consensus for government’s bills, mean value (and standard deviation) by party group (1996–2016)

– 0,26 (0,31) 0,27 (0,39) 0,20 (0,26) 0,55 (0,18) – – – 0,63 (0,17) 0,19 (0,35) – 0,84 (0,08) – – 0,23 (0,35) – 0,23 (0,34)

Letta

– 0,15 (0,24) 0,14 (0,27) 0,16 (0,23) – – 0,56 (0,16) – 0,67 (0,16) 0,09 (0,23) – 0,86 (0,04) – – 0,16 (0,30) – 0,14 (0,26)

Renzi

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stable legislative oppositions,2 while the XIII legislative term had witnessed some minor but significant changes after the fall of the Prodi government (1998), determining the split in the post-communist party which had externally supported Prodi, and the return into the majority of a centrist component of the former opposition. Looking to the XVI legislature, one should note much more noise: the mobility within the initial majority supporting the Berlusconi IV government and the redefinition of the parliamentary scene after the rise of the technocratic-led Monti cabinet (see Table 5.2) offer a very contradictory prospect. The second caveat refers to the consistently high value of standard deviation from the party means values of consensus, which marks a problem of unreliability of the same means, and that has to do, among the other things, with the incongruous patterns of “intra-group” legislative behaviour, which is certainly not a new feature of the Italian parliamentary scene. However, during the old times of the first republic, the high rate of internal fragmentation was a peculiarity of the governmental parties (Sartori 1976), while after the dissolution of the classic polarised party system, all the parliamentary groups have, in turn, showed a clear inclination to the internal conflicts, although the process of party personalisation and the recently developed open systems of intra-party candidate selection may have reduced the negative effect of heterogeneous preferences on the party unity in parliament (Ceron 2015). Even considering these warnings, a more substantive finding is worthy of note here: if we consider a distinction between “mainstream” and “populist/ radical” parties suggested by the recent literature (Mair 2013), we can notice that the first ones, when in opposition, tend to have a more consensual behaviour: this applies, in particular, to Forza Italia (1996–2001 and 2006–2008); the centre-left parties then merged in the Partito Democratico (XIV and XVI term) and above all the centrist MPs of Unione di Centro (XV and XVI). On the contrary, non-mainstream parties tend to show a systematic confrontation, thus confirming the reliability of a hypothesis based on the dilemma between responsiveness and responsibility. These descriptive figures are somehow consistent with the findings from the studies of parliamentary behaviour conducted during and after the phase of “political alternation” (Giuliani 2008; De Giorgi and Marangoni 2015; De Giorgi 2016): on the one hand, the rhetoric of the majoritarian democracy claimed by the reformers of the mid-nineties, by two very different leaders like Prodi and Berlusconi and by a large part of the media, seems to have produced a rather limited change in the traditional pattern of parliamentary centrality in the law-making process. On the other hand, some reduction of consensual practices is evident, depending on the degree of complexity of the party system and on the capability of the executive as a decision maker. However, the decline of the Italian classic consociativism makes way for an even more complicated and somehow disordered system of plural oppositions, which is just the opposite of a “majoritarian” model of parliamentary democracy.

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The multivariate analysis we present below will make us able to provide a more robust speculation about the true determinants of this evolution in the legislative behaviour. The level of analysis will be here that of legislative opposition behaviour, and the dependent variable used in the following models will be the index of consensus introduced above (variable CONSENSUS). Regarding the independent variables, we organised the analysis as follows: we first relied on the database on the Italian governments’ legislative initiatives hosted by the Centre for the Study of Political Change (CIRCaP) of the University of Siena (Marangoni 2016), which classifies each government bill according to whether it concerns or not any programmatic announcements and pledge of the executive, to create a dummy variable that takes value 1 when the voted law is programme related (and value 0 otherwise). We called this variable PROGRAMME, and we expect this variable to have a negative impact on Consensus, independently by the type of government. As it has been already argued, indeed, opposition parties should be particularly likely to contrast the passage of those bills linked to the government programmatic declarations, not only because they oppose “the content of the bills content, but also as a strategy to harass the government, and eventually bring it down” (De Winter 2004, p. 43). The same CIRCaP database provides information on the number of advisory committees to which each government bill has been assigned. We used this data as a proxy of the “policy comprehensiveness” (both in terms of scope and extension of the targeted interests and constituencies)3 of the laws. The variable is called COMPREHENSIVENESS and is expected to be negatively associated with consensus, since the more complex the policy networks, the more difficult the conditions for a general consensual attitude from the oppositions. The above propositions can be applied providing a stable political environment with no major endogenous factors challenging the alternation (or lack of alternation) of cabinets and political coalitions during a stable phase of governance (Verzichelli and Cotta 2000). However, in this research we should consider the important exogenous conditions that emerged during the past two decades. Hence, a first control will be proposed including in our models the variable ECONOMY, which is a dummy variable assuming value 1 when the given voted law has to do with macro-economic issues and public finance.4 Our expectations of the impact of this variable on Consensus are mixed: in general, it may have a negative impact on Consensus, given that the strict economic and financial priorities represent a further element of “policy comprehensiveness”. On the other hand (at least since 2008), economic bills have often been anti-crisis measures. As stated in the introduction of this volume, mainstream parties with a more pronounced familiarity to a governmental approach could be less inclined than radical or populist oppositions to assume a more adversarial attitude when this kind of policy priority does emerge. Similarly, the variable EU_INVOLVEMENT measures to what extent the policy field of each voted law fell into the EU “jurisdiction”. We thus followed

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Nugent (2006) and De Giorgi (2016) distinguishing government laws in five categories, according to whether they are characterised by: virtually no EU involvement (value 0), limited EU involvement (value 1), policy responsibilities shared between the EU and the member states (value 2), considerable EU involvement (value 3) and extensive EU involvement (value 4).5 In line with previous works on Italian law making that have emphasised how the parliamentary voting behaviour on EU-related matters has been increasingly politicised (Borghetto, Giuliani, and Zucchini 2009) along the government/ opposition dimension, we might expect EU involvement to have a negative impact on Consensus. As further control variables, the models we have developed consider a procedural variable (DECREE_LAW), which takes value 1 when the conversion of an executive decree law is voted, and value 0 for all the other ordinary laws,6 and a “political” variable which takes value 1 when the voting groups are “challenger” parties (defined as those parties that have taken independent positions in parliament, outside the main competing coalitions), and value 0 otherwise. According to what is argued in the introduction of this volume, we used this variable, called CHALLENGER, to control whether parties located at the extremes of the party system do behave differently (reasonably in a more conflictual way) than their mainstream counterparts. The last variable identifies the legislative term when any given law in our dataset has been approved, and is included in the model through four dummy variables (XIV, XV, XVI, XVII), corresponding to the legislative terms under investigation (with the XIII legislatures as the reference category). Table 5.4 presents the results of our analysis. Given the way we defined it, our dependent variable, Consensus, is bounded between 0 – the lowest level of group consensus – and 1 – the highest level of consensus – and has the typical format of fractional response data. The empirical model used to test our expectations is thus specified as a fractional logit model, as it seemed the best fit for this kind of data (Papke and Wooldridge 1996). Furthermore, given that the votes included in our database are repeatedly cast by the same parties, we adjusted the standard errors with clusters on parliamentary groups (Rogers 1994), so to avoid the risk that residuals are not independent within the same opposition group. Table 5.4 reports the two models we have estimated. The only difference between model A and model B is that they estimate alternatively the effects of Economy (model A) and EU involvement (model B), as the two factors are obviously collinear.7 The analysis confirms the multidimensional nature of the legislative behaviour of the opposition parties, testing all the relevant hypotheses without any specific rejection. The programmatic relevance of a given governmental initiative has a clear negative (and statistically significant) effect on the degree of consensus. The same negative effect seems to be also connected to the degree of comprehensiveness of legislative items. Finally, the degree of EU

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Table 5.4 The explanatory factors of the opposition’s voting behaviour in Italy (1996–2016) Model A Covariates Programme (1= programmatic nature) Comprehensiveness Eu involvement

−0.547*** (0.122) −0.102 (0.015)*** −0.110* (0.046)

Challenger (1= challenger party) Legislature (reference category: XIII) XIV XV legislature XVI XVII Constant Log pseudolikelihood AIC BIC N

−0.553*** (0.132) −0.080 (0.011)***

−1.093*** (0.159)

Economy (1= economic issue) Control Variables Decree law (1= decree law)

Model B

−0.029 (0.087) −0.691*** (0.117) 0.108 (0.103) 0.049 (0.142) 0.248 (0.165) −0.339* (0.145) −0.010 (0.105) −1225.191 0.915 −19892.26 2699

−0.056 (0.082) −0.700*** (0.118) 0.088 (0.102) 0.114 (0.147) 0.391* (0.175) −0.230 (0.146) −0.055 (0.127) −1197.331 −0.895 −19947.98 2699

Fractional logit estimation. Standard errors clustered on parliamentary group in parentheses. Significance (two-tailed): *