When does the parliamentary opposition take to the streets? Social protest against government COVID-19 policy

Abstract

This article identifies the conditions that made parliamentary oppositions in democratic countries more or less likely to participate in social protests against their government’s COVID-19 policies from 2020 to 2021. To that end, it compares 19 cases, testing the explanatory power of causal configurations consisting of four factors. The first is the parliamentary opposition’s level of power in the policy-making process. The second concerns the political-electoral moment in which the protests take place. The third and fourth refer, respectively, to the representation or non-representation of populist and far-right forces amongst the parliamentary opposition. The finding is that the parliamentary opposition’s involvement in social protests is due to different causal configurations. It occurred when some kind of non-far-right populism was represented in the parliamentary opposition, the parliamentary opposition had a low level of policy-making power and the protests could be exploited for electoral gain. Another explanation is the representation of populists who are also far right amongst the parliamentary ranks, even when the other conditions are not the most favourable in terms of the political moment and the level of institutional power of the opposition.

Keywords:

• Parliamentary opposition
• Covid-19
• social protests
• populism
• far right

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Antonio L. Cano for having commented on an earlier draft of this article. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers at the journal for their most valuable suggestions. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the 2022 AECPA General Conference. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We are aware that different empirical and normative proposals have been published on the concept of political opposition in democracies (see Blondel 1997; Brack and Weinblum 2011; Dahl 1966; Helms 2023). This paper circumscribes the concept of political opposition to parliamentary opposition, i.e. the groups and parties with representation in the lower house, and that are not part of the government coalition

2 The methodology section further explains this decision.

3 We do not consider other characteristics of the parliamentary opposition parties such as their size, whether or not they have previously held government office (Helms 2023), or if they are in power or in opposition at subnational parliamentary levels (Paxton, 2022; Pirro 2022). First, we discarded the size factor because all our cases include opposition political parties of different sizes, regardless of whether or not the parliamentary opposition participated in the protests. Second, we omitted the question of whether the opposition parties have a permanent or temporary opposition status because this variable is not a direct or automatic indicator of party behaviour and responsible action (De Giorgi and Ilonszki 2018; Ilonszki et al. 2021). Finally, we discarded the role of parliamentary opposition parties in subnational parliaments to avoid limiting the initial case selection. Considering this variable would have forced us to restrict the study to countries with similar decentralized systems of government.

4 We do not take into account other factors during this period, such as the degree of restrictiveness of a government’s anti-COVID policies or the severity of the health crisis. The reason for discarding the former is that the degree of tolerance to a certain level of restrictiveness may vary from case to case; that is, it does not have a determinant effect. The same or similar government anti-COVID policies can bring people together with the authorities to maintain order or may push them apart and create disorder (Reicher and Stott 2020). The latter factor is discarded based on the evidence that there is no significant relationship between this variable and the positive or negative sentiment of the parliamentary opposition toward the government’s crisis management (Louwerse et al. 2021).

5 This database identifies notable groups involved in protest, based on publications and television outlets (the list of the media used as a data source can be consulted in the ABOUT THE TRACKER section of the website, Global Protest Tracker – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Therefore, the coding rule used for the role of the parliamentary opposition in the protests was whether the group was present on or absent from the list of main participants in the protests provided by this database. The Global Protest Tracker (2021) does not distinguish between participants in the protests on the basis of whether they were initiators or mere followers. However, given that our study only distinguishes between participation and non-participation, the available data are sufficient for the purposes of our research.

6 We discarded fuzzy set theory even though it offers more analytical sophistication. This approach is more suited to explaining phenomena that do not behave in a categorical way, but that manifest themselves with different degrees in empirical reality.

7 Wegmann’s (2022) index combines three dimensions of opposition power, covering all stages of the parliamentary policy-making process. We find it to be more integrative than proposals like Garritzmann (2017) or Serban (2022). For Wegmann, the first stage is the opposition’s ‘initiation power’, which refers, amongst other aspects, to the ability to introduce bills or influence parliamentary agenda-setting and the format of the policy proposals to be voted on. The second is ‘debate power’, the possibilities the committee system affords the political opposition related to the submission of written questions and interpellations, oral questions, amendments, etc. The third is ‘veto power’, which refers, for example, to the executive’s ability to issue decrees and veto bills or the opposition’s ability to trigger a referendum.

8 The most recent version, 3.0, can be downloaded from the Comparative Methods for Systematic Cross-Case Analysis webpage: COMPASSS | Comparative Methods for Systematic Cross-Case Analysis.

9 We clarified the coding for the Italian case, given that a change of government took place in February 2021. The anti-government protests we observed were directed against the Draghi Administration, which incorporated parliamentary populist forces in the coalition government. Therefore, we coded Italy as a case of non-existence of at least one populist parliamentary opposition group.

Additional information

Funding

This work was conducted as part of the R&D and innovation project ‘The legal-political status of the political opposition in representative democracies’ [PID2020-117154GA-100], supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].

Notes on contributors

Guadalupe Martínez Fuentes

Guadalupe Martínez-Fuentes is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at University of Granada. Her research interests include: democratisation, political leadership, political opposition, and elections. She has published in Local Government Studies, Lex Localis-Journal of Local Self Government, Journal of North African Studies and International Journal of Electronic Governance, amongst others. [[email protected]]

Antonio Natera

Antonio Natera is Associate Professor in Political Science at Carlos III University of Madrid. His research interests and publications include topics related to political leadership, political opposition in democracies, crisis leadership, public management and democratic governance, amongst others. [[email protected]]