Patterns of Opposition in an Era of Democratic Decline: A Longitudinal Study of Oppositional Behaviour in Twelve Legislatures

There is something paradoxical about political opposition.

On the one hand, oppositional behaviour is crucial for keeping the government in check and presenting voters with political alternatives.

On the other hand, if opposition becomes overly confrontational, or promotes autocratic reforms, it becomes a destructive force that undermines rather than sustains democracy. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the current era of democratic decline.

Democracy indices provide extensive information on the global levels of democracy, including how the institutional side of political opposition has developed.

However, an important part of the puzzle is still missing: we lack systematic knowledge of oppositional behaviour in day-to-day politics.The purpose of this project is to shed new light on democracy’s crisis through a large-scale longitudinal study of oppositional behavior in twelve legislatures 2012-2022.

Empirically, the project will identify patterns of oppositional behaviour at three levels of analysis: the macro (legislature), meso (party) and micro (MP) level.

The project asks one overarching question: What patterns of oppositional behaviour exist in stable and backsliding democracies, and how have these changed during the last decade of democratic decline?The project will use supervised machine learning to develop a novel method for analysing oppositional behaviour that will open up future avenues for large-scale comparative work on political opposition.