Voting for Votes: Opposition Parties’ Legislative Activity and Electoral Outcomes

Abstract

Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government’s outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activity as a signaling tool of their attitude toward the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and individual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data of 27,371 respondents. The findings provide support for the existence of both mechanisms. Parliamentary conflict on legislative votes has a general positive effect on opposition parties’ electoral performance, conditional on systemic and party-specific factors.

Punishing the pseudo‐opposition: Accountability under a minority government

“…Overall, the results suggest that support parties can collect both credit and blame for government performance and, thus, that they are in no way exempt from retrospective voting. In line with the findings of Tuttnauer and Wegmann (2022), I find that when dissatisfied voters have to decide among opposition parties, they prefer opposition parties that confront the government rather than support parties that cooperate.…”

“…Stiers (2022) argued that voters want opposition parties to scrutinize government action and provide constructive criticism. In contrast, Tuttnauer and Wegmann (2022) argued that opposition parties should take a conflictual stance and differentiate themselves ideologically. The latter finding suggests that support parties, much like coalition members, have strong electoral incentives to signal distinctiveness especially when elections are approaching (Müller & König, 2021).…”

“…As Müller (2022) points out, support parties have strong incentives for highlighting their unique party profile and distinguish themselves from the governing parties (see also Müller & König, 2021; Tuttnauer & Wegmann, 2022). It is thus quite likely that support parties have no ambitions of joining the cabinet but prefer their access to policy influence without being associated with and held responsible for government actions (Strøm, 1990).…”

Government–Opposition Relations and the Vote of No-Confidence

“…Apart from the policy-driven question of whether it can agree with a certain government proposal, an opposition party may benefit in different ways from either supporting or opposing a government bill. A confrontational strategy helps the opposition to signal to voters its critical view of the government and distinguish itself from it (Ganghof and Bräuninger, 2006; Louwerse and Otjes, 2019; Tuttnauer and Wegmann, 2023). A cooperative strategy, on the other hand, may help it in gaining policy-related achievements for which it can claim credit (Mújica and Sánchez-Cuenca, 2006).…”

“…In this study, we follow others (e.g. Louwerse et al, 2017; Tuttnauer and Wegmann, 2023) in assessing government–opposition relations as it is manifested in legislative voting behaviour, that is, how parties vote on the various bills and decisions in the plenum, and particularly the degree to which it is defined by conflict or cooperation between the government and the opposition parties. A higher frequency of legislative voting conflict between the opposition and the government can be explained as the adoption of office- and/or vote-seeking behaviour, which highlights the differences between opposition and government.…”