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Consensus and Parliamentary Opposition: The Case of Spain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Abstract
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.
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References
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21
Capo's formula is , where vf stands for the number of votes for the law, n is the number of MPs of the main party, v is the total number of cast votes, and N is the size of the assembly. If the index has a value of 1, the incumbent party does not obtain support from any other parliamentary group. If the index has a value over 1, the incumbent gets support from other groups: the more so, the greater the number. Theoretically, the index can have a value under 1, for those rare cases in which the incumbent party is unable to obtain a yes vote from its own MPs. See Capo, ‘Oposición y minorías en las legislaturas socialistas’, pp. 96–7.Google Scholar
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