Abstract
Electoral competition with opposition parties is a crucial aspect in most theories of representative democracy. Nevertheless, political science research has paid less attention to oppositions than to governments. This paper attempts to fill this gap by investigating the factors driving the strategy of opposition parties in parliamentary votes. Our core question is when, and why, opposition parties pursue cooperative or competitive strategies vis-à-vis the government in plenary voting. Policy concerns may motivate an opposition party to cooperate with the government and support its position in voting. However, this effect is conditioned by the desire to send signals to voters because opposition parties also try to distinguish themselves from the government. Using data on all roll-call votes in the German Bundestag from 1949–2013, we show that spatial variables affect opposition voting only in electorally salient policy areas, whereas ideological distance has no discernible effect in less salient policy areas. Furthermore, we find that on average different opposition parties are more likely to act as a cohesive block instead of being divided. We also show that opposition parties behave more competitive in their own motions and that they become more cooperative the longer they have been represented in the Bundestag. Overall, these findings suggest that simple spatial arguments based on policy preferences alone are insufficient for explaining opposition behaviour in parliament and that signaling plays a major role.
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Notes
- 1.
Andeweg (2013) claims that such cooperation in parliament leads to a ‘blurring of opposition’, which inhibits opposition parties from presenting credible alternatives in the electoral arena and thus indirectly strengthens populist parties that can then present themselves to voters as the only ‘real’ alternative; see also Mair (2007). We do not pursue this more normative aspect of the argument in this paper.
- 2.
A note on terminology: We use the term ‘behaviour’ when referring to specific observable actions of parties. ‘Strategy’, on the other hand, characterises more general patterns of behaviour over time that derive from an overall plan.
- 3.
- 4.
Note that this hypothesis could also be based on mechanisms other than office-seeking. For example, increasing cooperation by new parties over time could be due to repeated interaction or socialisation into shared norms of legislative behaviour. The suggested mechanism via seeking governmental office follows from our theoretical model.
- 5.
We do not distinguish between motions from the cabinet proper or from cabinet parties in parliament.
- 6.
Roll call votes should represent central conflicts in many important policy areas. If there are observable patterns of signalling, they should be traceable in this sample. At the same time, roll calls are clearly not a representative sample of all votes in the Bundestag. Thus, the patterns we observe on roll calls are not necessarily characteristic of all floor votes. However, the descriptive results shown in the next section line up nicely with qualitative accounts of opposition behaviour, which indicates that any bias (if it exists at all) is not overly large.
- 7.
We dropped nine cases in which no party line could be determined because there was a tie within the party group.
- 8.
The findings reported below do not change substantively if free votes are included.
- 9.
Alternatively, one could also code the intensity of agreement by distinguishing two types of disagreement: weak disagreement (one side abstains, the other votes yea or nay) and strong disagreement (one side votes yea, the other nay). Empirically, the vast majority of disagreements (88.6%) are strong. Estimating an ordered logistic regression model with this trichotomous dependent variable yields the same results as those reported below.
- 10.
By using CMP data we assume that party positions can be measured from election manifestos and that these positions are valid for the entire legislative period. This assumption may be problematic if major exogenous events such as unexpected crises make parties reconsider their positions. However, such changes are rather rare, which is why almost all quantitative research seeking time-variant measures of party positions relies on CMP data (note that alternative data sources such as expert surveys are measured even more rarely).
- 11.
Our “other” category contains topics to which no clear CMP-items could be matched (e.g. reunification issues) or valence-only issues, i.e. items without a plausible “plus” and “minus” pole, are represented in the CMP dataset (agriculture).
- 12.
For policy area specific party positions of the “other” category, the catch-all logrile scale was used.
- 13.
Conceptualising the position of the cabinet as the seat-share weighted mean of the position of all cabinet parties is common in the literature. Theoretically, it is based on the assumption that government policy constitutes a compromise between the partners in which substantive influence is roughly proportional to party size in the legislature. Empirical research on government policy-making supports this assumption by showing that coalition cabinets can successfully reign in the freedom of ministers in law-making (e.g. Martin and Vanberg 2014; Strøm et al. 2010).
- 14.
In addition, we could measure the salience of policy areas separately for parties and electoral periods by summing up the shares of all CMP codes belonging to the respective policy areas in each party’s manifesto. However, this saliency measure is highly correlated (r > 0.50) with some of the policy area dummies. Furthermore, the variable is not defined for the residual policy area leading to a loss of 350 observations on 132 roll calls. For both reasons, we do not include the party-specific salience measure in the models below. However, doing so does not affect the core results presented below.
- 15.
77% of these motions were initiated by the mediation committee or Bundesrat, which can relate to initiatives that were originally introduced by government or opposition parties; 10% of the residual category motions are cross-camp initiatives.
- 16.
Only motions where the Greens and the PDS/Linke were the first or only initiator are counted.
- 17.
In other specifications, we also tested for an electoral-cycle effect by subdividing each legislative period into yearly episodes. We find no evidence for cyclical patterns; in particular, there is no increase in competitive behaviour before elections.
- 18.
Other explanatory variables are held at their observed values (Hanmer and Kalkan 2013). The random effects are set to zero. The vertical lines at the top of the graphs show the distribution of the ideological distance variable.
- 19.
Another implication of the signalling argument is that opposition parties should show more-competitive behaviour on roll calls that they requested themselves (assuming that roll-call request is a signalling device). The problem with testing this argument is that we often lack information on who requested the roll call, resulting in the number of observations beings reduced by about one third to 2829 observations in 1159 roll calls. Re-estimating our models on this reduced sample shows that opposition parties are indeed significantly less likely to vote with the government on roll calls that they requested themselves. The other findings remain qualitatively the same, although statistical uncertainty increases due to the loss of observations. Detailed results are available from the authors on request.
- 20.
We do not interpret the “unknown sponsor” category because it potentially contains both initiatives originally sponsored by government and by opposition parties.
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Hohendorf, L., Saalfeld, T., Sieberer, U. (2020). Oppositional Strategies Between Cooperation and Conflict: An Analysis of Opposition Party Voting in the German Bundestag, 1949–2013. In: Bukow, S., Jun, U. (eds) Continuity and Change of Party Democracies in Europe. Politische Vierteljahresschrift Sonderhefte. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28988-1_11
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