Government-Opposition in Southern European Countries During the Financial Crisis ─ Great Recession, Great Cooperation?

The international economic crisis has hit Europe, especially its ‘periphery’, remarkably hard, and has had deep consequences at the economic and political levels. Since its onset, parties in parliament (especially those in opposition) have found themselves faced with a dilemma: choosing between the need to cooperate with the government in order to overcome the crisis and the opportunity provided by a weakened government to stress their adversarial position, so as to be more easily re-elected and possibly get into power. What have they decided to do? This is a crucial question, for which there is no easy or intuitive answer. The present volume introduces a collection of works exploring this dilemma in southern European countries, by examining the opposition behaviour in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain; and in the European Parliament. In so doing, we shall try to understand not only what kind of impact the crisis has had on the level of consensus in parliament in the four countries mentioned, but also whether differences are observable across cases.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.

Elisabetta De Giorgi is a post-doctoral fellow at the FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon. Her main research interests are parliaments from a comparative perspective, in particular, parliamentary opposition and the law-making process. She has published several articles in national and international journals – in Acta Politica, Journal of Legislative Studies, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Italian Political Science Review, South European Society and Politics, among others – and book chapters.

Catherine Moury is Assistant professor at the FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon. Her research focuses on institutional change in the EU and comparative policy-making. She has published in journals such as European Journal of Public Policy, West European Politics and Party Politics. She is the author of ‘Coalition Government and Party Mandate: How coalition agreements constrain ministerial action’ (Routledge, 2013) and ‘Changing rules of delegation: A contest of Power for comitology’ (with A. Heritier, C. Bisschoff e C-F. Bergstrom, Oxford University Press, 2013).