Whereas a vast body of research deals with the behavior of government parties and executive-legislative relations, relatively few contributions have focused on the role of parliamentary opposition. As a consequence, our understanding of opposition parties still remains rather limited. Undoubtedly, this book is an important contribution to fill this existing research gap and one of the very few comparative contributions to the research on opposition parties. The purpose of this volume is to examine how parliamentary opposition parties behave in European democracies and what explains differences in their behavior. The authors are especially interested in whether results point toward some general shared trends among different countries or whether they still point toward extreme variation in the behavior of opposition parties (as Dahl identified in his 1966 volume on Political Oppositions in Western Democracies).
In their Introduction, the editors De Giorgi and Ilonszki present a theoretical framework and expectations that guide the different country chapters. The analyses presented in the country chapters focus on three different activities of opposition parties in parliament: voting on legislation, proposing legislation, and scrutinizing the government. To explain opposition behavior, De Giorgi and Ilonszki present explanatory variables in three broad areas: the party context including the level of polarization and the difference between permanent and temporary opposition; the institutional setting in which parties interact including, among others, consensus oriented political systems, second chambers, and presidential veto rights; and external constraints including the onset of the global financial crisis and the expansion of the EU intervention in the national decision making. The book analyses the formulated expectations by focusing on 11 country cases: Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Switzerland.
Each of the country chapters presents a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses including an impressive data collection effort. All country chapters cover several years and different government compositions. This allows not only for comparisons between countries but also for an in-depth analysis of the developments within the different countries over time. Moreover, the reader extremely benefits from the similar structure of the empirical chapters facilitating comparison between the different countries. The authors of the separate country chapters still manage a good balance between presenting empirical results that are comparable across countries and giving enough background information to understand country specific developments and characteristics.
The very ambitious theoretical framework is the book's strength and weakness at the same time. Two aspects are worth mentioning: first, no justification is provided for the specific case selection. On the one hand, De Giorgi and Ilonszki present a quite long list of factors that might have a positive or negative effect on the conflict potential of opposition parties. On the other hand, however, the 11 country cases are not presented as to be systematically chosen due to their specific characteristics to test the formulated hypotheses. Overall, the editors mention Germany and Hungary to be the two countries at the extremes as far as the conflict potential is concerned. In Germany only the permanent opposition and the high opposition polarization raises the potential of conflict (whereas strong veto players decrease it). On the contrary, in Hungary the permanent opposition, the closed structure of competition, new democracy, high party polarization, high opposition polarization, the crisis effect, and the high opposition divide on the EU increase the conflict potential (table on p. 11).
However, the reader would benefit from a more detailed discussion as to which country comparisons are most interesting with reference to the influence of specific factors. More details in the Introduction would guide the reader and help connect the different country chapters. For example, what can one learn from comparing the EU member states to non-EU member such as Switzerland? More generally, is there a shared pattern in the level of conflict between countries for which the editors expect a crisis effect (Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Romania, and Switzerland) and the ones for which they do not? Similarly, to further disentangle the effect of the type of government which the editors conclude to be among the explanatory factors of conflict, what conclusions could be drawn from a comparison of the three consensus democracies (Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) as each of them shows a different predominant type of government (minority, minority and minimum winning coalitions, and surplus majorities, respectively)? On the contrary, what interesting conclusions can be drawn from a comparison of Denmark, Spain, and Romania, all of which show frequent minority governments but are not all consensus democracies?
Second, and linked to the previous point, although the editors mention the importance of the institutional setting for the behavior of opposition parties, the discussion of the influence of such institutions remains rather vague. This is especially true for the influence of the ‘rules of the parliamentary game’ (p. 7). More recently, the literature has presented possibilities to look at the institutional opportunities available to oppositions more systematically. For example, Julian Garritzmann does provide information of the power granted to opposition parties (How much power do oppositions have? Comparing the opportunity structures of parliamentary oppositions in 21 democracies, The Journal of Legislative Studies, 23(1): 1–30). Even though data are only available for six out of the 11 countries represented in the book, Garritzmann does present a framework to systematically compare opposition's control opportunities and the ones to present alternatives. A closer look at how these rules of the game might constrain or empower opposition parties might have further contributed to the understanding of their conflict level.
In sum, this volume is a highly interesting contribution to the literature on opposition behavior in parliament. It provides a convincing analytical framework and in-depth analyses of 11 European countries combining qualitative with quantitative analyses. Especially the comprehensive analyses of the behavior of opposition parties relating to different areas (behavior in the law-making process and scrutiny of the government) allow for a more extensive understanding of opposition behavior in the parliamentary arena. Due to its empirical richness and attention to detail regarding the country specific background the book is an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on opposition parties and legislative studies more generally.
