What do people want from opposition parties? A cross-national experimental study

Opposition parties in modern democracies often find themselves having to balance their various functions and goals, such as representing their voters and influencing policy-making on the one hand, and criticising the government and presenting an alternative to it on the other hand. The emphasis on either of these functions leads to different strategies, measurable by confrontation or agreement with the government. Recent studies suggest that voters tend to reward opposition parties for confronting the government. However, these have relied on observational analyses and have not been able to investigate the underlying micro-mechanisms in detail.In this paper, we present the results of a novel survey experiment conducted among 12,824 respondents in nine European countries. The respondents were shown several hypothetical government-opposition interactions regarding government legislation and were asked to rate the opposition’s response. We manipulate the legislation initiative’s subject, direction, and magnitude, as well as the opposition’s response, distinguishing not only between agreement and confrontation but also between ideological and other justifications.Among other findings, we show that voters prefer compromise and agreement over refusal to compromise, but this preference is weaker the farther the proposed legislation is from the opposition’s ideal point.