Making and Breaking Parliamentary Opportunity Structures

The parliamentary arena offers the resources for opposition parties to carry out two functions: the control of the government and the ability of political deliberation. However, governmental dominance can limit the opposition parties’ opportunities through strong agenda-control, the acceleration of the legislative process , scrutiny mechanisms and disciplinary mechanisms. These constraints can either be applied trough the extensive use of already existing parliamentary tools or through the change of parliamentary procedures. The paper analyses the changing parliamentary structure of opportunities based on the Polish and Hungarian cases. Recently both countries have witnessed profound changes in their political systems that have also affected their respective parliaments. The question arises about how these changes affected the opposition’s opportunity structure within these parliaments? The first dimension of the analysis distinguishes between “efficient change” aimed at addressing the parliamentary bottleneck and “redistributive changes” aimed at shifting the power balance between the government and the opposition. The second dimension of the analysis focuses on how the changes relate to the functions of the opposition distinguishing between the control function and the function of presenting alternatives. The two dimensions are expected to be cross-cutting as efficient changes often limit the opposition’s capacity to present alternatives in the parliament. These changes often prompt the involvement of extra-parliamentary institutions that can act as safeguards against the distortion of the parliamentary power structure. Thus the third dimension of analysis is the impact of external institutions mainly the constitutional courts on the regulation of the parliamentary arena. Based on the two case studies will be compared to reveal how the strength of the government (qualified majority or not), the type of government (coalition or one-party government), the strength of veto players (the president and the constitutional court) and the fragmentation of opposition relate to the type of implemented changes.