Populist Opposition: A Comparative Approach to the Opposition Styles of Populist Parties

Populist parties have become a mainstay of European parliamentary politics. Most countries have a populist party as an opposition party. The central question of our study is whether their populism feeds into their parliamentary behaviour. Are populist more inclined to choose particular tools? Or even to use a particular parliamentary style? The opposition party behaviour of populist parties has been subject to less scrutiny than their behaviour in government, even though these parties are more often opposition parties than government parties (e.g. Albertazzi & Müller 2013). We use a new typology of opposition party activity to measure opposition party behavior comparatively across a number of European democracies which have had a populist opposition party. We distinguish between scrutiny and policy-making activity in parliament, which are operationalized using parliamentary activities such as asking written and oral questions and voting against bills (scrutiny) and introducing bills, amendments and motions (policy-making). We propose that populist parties are likely to primarily use scrutiny tools to criticize the government but also to draw attention to issues that the government neglects. Initial support for this expectation has been found in an analysis of the case of the Netherlands (Louwerse & Otjes 2018). The proposed paper extends this analysis by comparing opposition styles in a number of European democracies (all countries included in the edited volume by De Giorgi & Ilonszki 2018). In order to do so, we tackle the issue of comparability of parliamentary behavior across countries using scaling analysis. The core analyses of the paper are two (multilevel) regression analyses where we look at the scale of scrutiny and policy-making activity and see whether populist parties score higher on it compared to non-populist countries.