Voting Behavior of Opposition Parties in Sweden

Does the level of salience of legislative issues have an effect on voting behavior of opposition parties in Sweden? A previous study by Klüver and Zubek (2017) states that under minority government there is greater division between government and opposition parties when dealing with more divisive issues in parliament. This lets us assume that legislative issues of greater salience show a greater potential of conflict in the voting behavior between government and opposition parties. Conducting a salience index fitted to the policy fields in Swedish parliament by taking data from the SOM-Institute as well as analyzing over 18,000 government bills under seven minority governments (1991-2018), I conclude that for most cases the level of salience has positive effects on conflict voting behavior between government and opposition parties. There is a greater chance that the opposition parties vote against the government if the issue is considered more salient. In turn, there is a greater chance that the opposition parties vote in line with the government if the issue is considered less salient. However, these results cannot be found for each case. The results for the opposition parties; the Green Party, the Left Party, the Sweden Democrats as well as the New Democracy showed a contrary but less strong effect. There is a greater chance that these parties vote in line with the government on more salient legislative issues than on less salient legislative issues, especially when the respective government parties were ideologically close. This effect can also be seen for support parties. The chance that support parties vote in line with the government is higher on more salient issues while the overall variance in the voting behavior between salient and non-salient legislative issues is low. Klüver, H., & Zubek, R. (2017). Minority governments and legislative reliability. Party Politics, 10, S. 1-12.