Holding Tight or Letting Go? Parliamentary Opposition Behaviour in New Democracies

Paper is aimed at giving contribution to the existing academic debate whether there is a ‘blurriness’ of opposition parties when they are compared to their supposed main rival – government. I use agenda-setting literature as a theoretical framework in order to construct the main argument of the paper that states how there is a significant distinction between government and opposition in parliament with opposition parties reacting and influencing government agenda-setting. Therefore, the main focus is placed on MPs questions as a powerful parliamentary mechanism which allows the opposition to question and set government policy. In order to test this, I use Comparative Agendas Project data on the case of Croatia, as one of the new democracies from Eastern Europe, region that was highly understudied when the opposition is in question. The time period taken into account is from 1992 to 2015, covering 6 elections, variety of left-right oppositions, as well as political system change in 2000 that went from semi-presidential to a parliamentary one. Quantitative analysis is conducted in order to test hypothesis looking at the agenda policy distribution of opposition questions compared to government weekly agenda policy distribution while controlling for other variables such as the ideology of opposition and media agenda. Initial analysis indicates that there are strong correlations and significant relationship between the distribution of policies on government and opposition agenda, which is not the case for other variables. The fact that opposition asks the same questions that government addresses mean that opposition is not allowing a government to go easy through the legislative process and even potentially influence what gets on agenda. In conclusion, I stress how opposition indeed reacts to government and vice-versa and I recommend further comparative research on the subject in order to form more generality for opposition behaviour in new democracies.