What kind of opposition do citizens want?

Opposition parties fulfil a key role in democracies, by holding the government to account and providing an alternative at the next election. While researchers have recognized various roles of opposition parties, little is known about citizens’ perspectives on the role of opposition parties and their evaluation of the fulfilment of these roles. We develop a framework that distinguishes between three main functions of opposition parties: criticizing and monitoring the government (criticism), providing an alternative at the next elections (alternative) and working with the government to get things done (cooperation). The paper aims to both describe citizens’ views on opposition functions, their perceived fulfilment and explain variation therein: How important is each main opposition party function for citizens, how do they evaluate their fulfilment, and how can we explain variation in both? We hypothesize that the priority of each of these functions as well as the perceived fulfilment depends on citizens’ evaluation of current politics, character traits, political interest, level of education, as well as the country context. These questions are studied using a representative citizen survey held in Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These countries present variation in terms of electoral system and the frequency of minority government. The dependent variables are how important a respondent thought various roles of the opposition were for democracy in general, and to what extent each role applied in the country context. Using OLS regression analysis, we assess the explanatory power of the key independent variables.