Negative Interplay between Cabinet and Opposition Agendas: Evidence from Croatia

Abstract

Despite the contemporary notion that government and opposition parties’ agendas in the long run positively influence each other, there are reasons to argue that different dynamics are at play as well. More specifically, previous studies neglected to address the short-term, transient interplay between parties’ agendas (within a year) while dominantly focussing on what governing parties talk about (and not on what they actually decide). Therefore, this article focuses on this short-term dynamic by hypothesising that governing parties (in cabinet meetings) and opposing parties (in parliamentary questions) feature issues that are undisclosed by the other side in the recent past, and as such create a negative issue attention influence. In other words, if the government places a certain issue high on its cabinet agenda, it will cause the opposition to avoid that issue in their parliamentary questions in the following months and vice versa. By analysing issue-coded data from the government’s cabinet meetings and opposition questions in Croatia (1992–2017) across multiple issues, I can provide evidence that supports these hypotheses. As such, this study contributes to the current knowledge on the relationship between government and opposition issue attention by offering another take on their interaction from a negative influence perspective.

The Role of Gender in Parliamentary Attacks and Incivility

“…This makes it a perfect case of parliamentary politics to explore whether there are gender differences in attack strategies that seek to fulfil politicians' goals. This was empirically demonstrated in several studies conducted on QTSs from Belgium (Sevenans & Vliegenthart, 2016;Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011), Croatia (Kukec, 2022;Poljak, 2022), and the UK (Bevan & John, 2016;Seeberg, 2020) which have shown how politicians use QTSs to fulfil their policy aspiration, such as placing issues higher on the agenda and trying to pursue voters to elect them at the upcoming elections.…”