Parliamentary Opposition in Post-Consociational Democracies: Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands

Abstract

This paper derives various hypotheses about parliamentary opposition in Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands from consociational theory, with the common denominator that there was cooperation rather than competition among the main political parties. Although to varying degrees, and with significant exceptions, this expectation was largely confirmed. Since the 1960s, though, each of these countries has experienced some degree of de-pillarisation, which had the hypothesised effect of increased competition in the electoral and parliamentary arenas. However, at the same time the main parties lost some of their ideological distinctiveness, leading to a major change in the basic opposition patterns that could be characterised, with some exaggeration, as having evolved ‘from opposition without competition to competition without opposition’. In the 1960s Arend Lijphart predicted that this would lead to anti-system opposition from the radical Left. Contrary to that expectation, the three countries witnessed challenges from the populist Right, with important differences between Belgium on the one hand, and Austria and the Netherlands on the other, as to the reaction by the main parties to this new opposition.