Support Party Strategies on Important Policy Issues: Results from Swedish Minority Governments

The survival of minority governments depends on support from non-cabinet parties that strive to safeguard government stability while also fulfilling their accountability to the electorate. This article argues that non-cabinet parties' propensity to support the government depends on their desire to uphold distinctiveness when accountability is at stake. This even applies to opposition parties that are officially committed to minority government support and, as a trade-off, receive policy pay-offs. By analysing opposition party voting in 23 years of Swedish minority governments (1991–2018), the article suggests that ideologically distant support parties are more likely to oppose the government on their core issues since compromise would involve too-large concessions. These results question our understanding of support party pay-offs as a trade-off for minority government support and highlight the rationality of entering a support agreement, which gives the support party a certain degree of policy influence while also keeping a distinct party profile.

Albania’s main opposition party faces long struggle

Headline ALBANIA: Main opposition party faces long struggle

Opposition Party Behavior and Minority Government Support

Opposition parties in minority governments are partly responsible for government stability without being able to neglect their accountability to the electorate, a dilemma that, as this book shows, has many electoral as well as policy advantages for opposition parties. This book’s analysis of opposition behavior in the Swedish Riksdag (1991–2018) sheds light on the rationality of minority governments from an opposition perspective: receiving political influence without jeopardizing one's party profile. The author studies oppositional behavior in Swedish minority governments using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Emotion and Reason in Political Language

This paper studies the use of emotion and reason in political discourse. Adopting computational-linguistics techniques to construct a validated text-based scale, we measure emotionality in 6 million speeches given in U.S. Congress over the years 1858-2014. Intuitively, emotionality spikes during times of war and is highest in speeches about patriotism. In the time series, emotionality was relatively low and stable in earlier years but increased significantly starting in the late 1970s. Across Congress Members, emotionality is higher for Democrats, for women, for ethnic/religious minorities, for the opposition party, and for members with ideologically extreme roll-call voting records.