Opposition Party Strategies Under Minority Government

How do Swedish opposition parties handle the dilemma of competing with other parties and keeping a sharp party profile while cooperating in the collective endeavor of making a minority government work? The paper addresses this question with evidence from a mixed-methods design. It presents results, first, from a quantitative analysis on a novel dataset on all proposal votes in 23 year of minority government in the Swedish Riksdag (1991-2018). These findings are combined, second, with evidence from qualitative interviews with Swedish political elites. These have been asked questions specifically for better making sense of the results from the quantitative analysis. The hypotheses tested in the analysis are derived from major strands of coalition theory as well as existing work on opposition party behavior. Accordingly, the empirical analysis tests various aspects of a larger strategic calculus of opposition parties that is presumed to affect their propensity to cooperate with the minority government. By applying various regression models, patterns of cooperation between an opposition party and a minority government could be identified. The results indicate that cooperation between an opposition party and a minority government does only to a limited degree follow the patterns of a coalition between governing parties. Rather, the data showed that when an opposition parties and a minority government are ideologically close several factors cause that all actors seem to worry a great deal about their distinctiveness from each other and tend to cooperate less likely. The quantitative analysis gave a first systematic account for explaining opposition-government cooperation under minority formation. Against the backdrop of these findings, the semi-structured interviews with Swedish opposition party elites serve to validate the party strategies indicated by the quantitative data. This second part of the analysis serves to shed light on the underlying bargaining processes between opposition parties and minority government that precede parliamentary votes and that cannot be ascertained by means of quantitative data alone.