Consensus and Parliamentary Opposition: The Case of Spain

It is well known that in developed democracies the opposition tends to cooperate with the government. Spain is no exception: around 70 per cent of all ‘organic laws’ (constitutionally significant bills that require a parliamentary majority to be passed) are approved with the support of the main opposition party. We try to explain the variation in the level of consensus in the first seven legislative terms of the current Spanish democracy. We show that there are three key variables: the balance of power between government and opposition, the nature of the institutional actor that first proposes the bill, and the ideological significance of the bill.