Opposition Party Criticism Inside and Outside of Parliament

Opposition parties play a crucial role in parliamentary democracies (Dahl, 1966, p. 11) as they contribute to the establishment of accountability, responsiveness and innovation (Franzmann, 2011). Of special importance for this is oppositional criticism. Criticism is the most powerful form of communication behaviour to pressure the government (Steffani, 1989, p. 1328). Through public criticism opposition parties can influence government policy (Seeberg, 2016, 2023) or ultimately the composition of the government. Opposition parties exert criticism through public communication about governmental (mis)behaviour, in order to influence the preferences of voters (Steffani, 1979, p. 245). In doing so opposition parties are active in two main arenas: the electoral and the parliamentary arena. However, the strategies employed in these arenas differ significantly. As Andeweg (2013) notes, opposition parties in parliament aim to (co-)implement policy goals, whereas they primarily focus on maximizing votes and gaining office in the electoral arena. Consequently, opposition parties may act differently in each arena. These differences, however, may create tension that undermines the credibility of opposition parties and potentially weakens party democracy as a whole. For instance, the need for collaboration in parliament may hinder opposition parties from effectively criticising the government in the electoral arena (Andeweg, 2013). However, the simultaneous consideration of opposition behaviour, and especially criticism, in the parliamentary and the electoral arena is still very rare (e. g. Conti et al., 2019; Jensen & Seeberg, 2015; Seeberg, 2013). Therefore, this paper asks: how does the communicated criticism of opposition parties differ inside and outside parliament and what influences these differences? Various factors will influence the differences in behaviour. For example, it is expected that challenger and mainstream parties will differ in their behaviour, as mainstream parties have a stronger focus on office seeking than challenger parties (Louwerse et al., 2017; van de Wardt et al., 2014). Moreover, based on competition theory, it can be assumed that parties will try to improve their electoral position in both arenas during the election campaign. Accordingly, they will increase the intensity of criticism in both arenas in order to portray the government more negatively in public, the closer an election is (Conti et al., 2019; Schwalbach, 2022). To explore the impact of these dynamics, the paper focuses on 74 opposition parties in six countries from 2010 until 2018. Criticism is measured using sentiment analysis, looking at the proportion of critical statements about governmental behaviour. The data source for the parliament are parliamentary debates (Rauh & Schwalbach 2020, Kartalis & Costa Lobo 2021), while outside parliament criticism is measured using party tweets. This paper applies supervised machine learning models to compare and analyse the sentiment of political speech across varying contexts, accounting for differences in format, style, language, and political dynamics.