Democratically elected governments may sometimes give in to pressures from extreme constituents thereby failing to adopt policies congruent with the median voter's preferences. This situation is exacerbated by the inability or the reluctance of voters to acquire information about the consequences of policy alternatives. Opposition parties, in principle, could help remedy this problem using the prerogatives at their disposal such as participating in legislative debates and proposing bills, amendments or no confidence motions. In practice, however, they may have incentives to mislead the voters for policy or election purposes. Given the critical role of opposition parties to remedy problems of incongruence, it is essential to gain theoretical clarity and empirical knowledge as to when and how opposition parties use the tools available to them in legislatures. My dissertation contributes to the recently growing literature that studies the behavior of opposition parties in different institutional contexts, and the implications of that behavior for democratic representation. In particular, I examine the conditions under which opposition parties provide the voters with accurate information, thereby inducing the government to act in accordance with voters' demands and interests. My analysis reconsiders the conventional wisdom that the influence of opposition parties on policy making is commensurate with their electoral strength or seat share in the legislature.In the first paper, I develop a formal model that examines the interaction between a government with control over a policy proposal and an opposition party faced with the decision whether to attract voters' attention to the proposal by objecting to its adoption. The model assumes that the government has incentives to pursue policies divergent from voter preferences and that voters face non-trivial costs in monitoring the government's legislative proposals. Voters can use the objection of the opposition party as a signal to identify adverse government proposals. However, for the mechanism to work, the opposition party should be responsible, i.e. not alarm the voters too frequently. I show that confrontation between the government and the opposition party is more likely when the chances of election for the opposition party are sufficiently low and the opposition activists are sufficiently distant in terms of their ideological positions from the government (as well as the voter and the opposition party itself). In addition to providing useful signals, the presence of a responsible opposition party may increase voters' welfare by inducing the government to preemptively adjust its policies.In the second paper, I propose a formal model that explores whether the voters can receive accurate information from the opposition party under further constraints. More specifically, the model assumes that the voters do not have the means to verify the accuracy of information they receive about the policy and furthermore they have limited information about the preferences of the government and the opposition party. I show that the opposition party can discipline the government to choose policies congruent with voters' preferences if the reputation of the opposition is high and the benefit of policy to the government is small relative to the benefit of winning elections. Under the same conditions, however, misleading messages of the opposition party may cause a good government to implement policies that bring about bad outcomes for the voters.In the the third paper, I examine when legislators withdraw their support from the bills that they cosponsored using an original dataset of cosponsorship in the US House of Representatives. I argue that the legislators take into account the preferences of their constituency in their cosponsorship decisions. Since acquiring information about the bills is costly, legislators use the cosponsorship decisions of their counterparts as signals for the acceptability of the bill for their constituency. My analysis shows that there is a relationship between the partisan composition of cosponsors and the likelihood that he/she decides to remove his/her name from the bill later. More specifically, a legislator is less likely to remove his/her name from a bill that he/she cosponsored as the difference between the number of his/her partisans that cosponsored the bill and the number of his/her opponents that cosponsored the bill increases.

Previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies, this volume offers a broad comparative assessment of the many faces of parliamentary opposition in different political, legal and cultural settings. Issues of political opposition, and of parliamentary opposition in particular, are at the very heart of the study of democratic processes in different parts of the world. Written by leading scholars in the field, this book looks both at the core features of the parliamentary opposition itself and its role in the legislative and wider political process. This includes an inquiry into the manifold challenges that the parliamentary opposition in many countries has come to face in the more recent past, in particular the rise of different non-parliamentary opposition actors. The countries covered in this volume include the old democracies of the Anglo-Saxon world, continental Europe and Japan, and the new democracies and democratizing regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Africa. Another chapter looks at the manifestations of parliamentary opposition within the multi-level system of the European Union

Proposing a novel way to look at the consolidation of democratic regimes, this book presents important theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of democratic consolidation, legislative organization, and public opinion. Theoretically, Simone Wegmann brings legislatures into focus as the main body representing both winners and losers of democratic elections. Empirically, Wegmann shows that the degree of policy-making power of opposition players varies considerably between countries. Using survey data from the CSES, the ESS, and the LAPOP and systematically analyzing more than 50 legislatures across the world and the specific rights they grant to opposition players during the policy-making process, Wegmann demonstrates that neglecting the curial role of the legislature in a democratic setting can only lead to an incomplete assessment of the importance of institutions for democratic consolidation. The Power of Opposition will be of great interest to scholars of comparative politics, especially those working on questions related to legislative organization, democratic consolidation, and/or public opinion.

Brings together empirical studies of the internal cohesiveness of political party groups in European parliaments and the leadership behavior that leads to disciplined parties in parliament, in sections on theories and definitions, the "Westminster Model," established continental European systems, newly emerging systems, and parliamentary discipline and coalition governments. Chapters originated as papers presented at a spring 1995 workshop held in Bordeaux, France. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR