IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/egr/ejge00/v2i1p41-58.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Government vs opposition voting in the Finnish parliament Eduskunta since World War II

Author

Listed:
  • Antti Pajala

    (University of Turku)

Abstract

In a parliamentary system it is by definition justified to assume the government parties voting almost always in a unitary manner in plenary votes. In a multiparty system it is, however, hard to predict how the opposition groups vote. Few studies analysing government-opposition voting in the Finnish parliament Eduskunta were published during the 1960s and 1970s. This study provides similar analyses regarding the parliamentary years of 1991-2012. Combined the studies provide an insight into the government-opposition relations since World War II. The results show that before the 1990s the government-opposition division in plenary votes appeared rather clear and the political party groups’ positions followed the traditional left-right dimension. Since the 1990s, the government-opposition division has become greater. The governing coalition acts almost as a bloc while the opposition groups are divided into moderate and hard opposition. The opposition groups, however, appear in a more or less random order. Consequently, since the 1990s the left-right dimension has disappeared with respect to plenary voting.

Suggested Citation

  • Antti Pajala, 2013. "Government vs opposition voting in the Finnish parliament Eduskunta since World War II," European Journal of Government and Economics, Europa Grande, vol. 2(1), pages 41-58, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:egr:ejge00:v:2:i:1:p:41-58
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ejge.org/index.php/ejge/article/download/32/30
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Salla Simola & Jeremias Nieminen & Janne Tukiainen, 2023. "A century of partisanship in Finnish political speech," Discussion Papers 160, Aboa Centre for Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    voting; parliament; opposition; Finland;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:egr:ejge00:v:2:i:1:p:41-58. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Europa Grande (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.