Parliamentary Opposition under Minority Parliamentarism: Scandinavia

Opposition parties are essential to parliamentary democracy. Through parliament and electorate they are the means of holding government accountable. However, as noted by Robert Dahl, opposition is found in very different patterns. In this paper we assess how opposition parties perform under minority government in the three countries of Scandinavia by looking at four aspects of those parties: their composition in terms of strength, ideology and fragmentation, their institutional setting, their role in the legislative process and, finally, their importance compared to non-parliamentary oppositions. We find that parliamentary opposition is influential under minority government, but during the last two decades government and opposition parties have become more ‘integrated’ in policy-making, although this has been achieved differently in each country.