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In this article we empirically test the impact of ideological distance between opposition parties and incumbents on consensus in parliament in two different countries, Portugal and Spain, amid changing economic conditions. To do so, we employ the Comparative Manifesto Project database and develop a measure of ideological distance on the left-right and the centre-periphery dimensions based on parties' preferences as expressed in their manifestos. We demonstrate that the economic crisis had different effects in the two countries. In Portugal, it amplified the negative impact on consensus of ideological distance between the incumbent and opposition parties. As expected, parties more distant from the incumbent on the left-right continuum were more likely to vote against legislation. In Spain, by contrast, changes in the party system forced traditional mainstream parties, especially the socialists, to increase their opposition in parliament. Moreover, the crisis amplified the effect of the centre-periphery dimension on parliamentary conflict. As a result, not only parties ideologically distant from the incumbent on the left-right continuum were more likely to vote against legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposition responsibility is a neglected field, and if at all noticed, opposition parties are often placed in the irresponsibility frame. The purpose of our paper is to examine to what extent, under which conditions, and in which ways opposition parties can be considered to act responsibly. This article will develop the concept of opposition responsibility and test the expectations in the behaviour of opposition parties in three countries: Hungary, Italy and Spain. The analysis highlights that opposition responsibility exceeds—although does not exclude—policy making and scrutiny activities as it has broader implications. We shall regard the opposition's general performance and their political system-related behaviour as components of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first outlines the conditions in which the media could contribute to creating and maintaining an atmosphere that discourages corruption practices. Second, based on the content analysis of 4361 online news articles, it demonstrates that these conditions are not present in the media coverage of corruption in Spain. The Spanish media do not promote a substantive frame, i.e., a meaningful discussion on the causes, consequences and remedies of corruption. There is a very low correspondence between how corruption is debated in the parliament, where substantive frames predominate, and how it is reported in the media. Furthermore, the media do not promote a pluralistic debate. The main players in corruption related articles are the judiciary and political actors, mainly executive elites and political parties involved in corruption scandals. Even though civil society actors, such as non-governmental organizations, are important for generating public pressure against corrupt practices, the results show that these groups go practically unnoticed in public debates. The findings also show that the dynamics that could help to curb corruption are neither present in the news articles of a news agency, nor in those published in newspapers with different political orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research demonstrates that the salience of EU affairs in domestic parliaments is mainly driven by government parties. This has been interpreted as illustrating the so-called opposition deficit thesis and mainly explained considering governments' informational advantages and reporting duties. Drawing on a dataset on oral questions introduced in plenary meetings in the Spanish parliament, this article sheds new light on government and opposition MPs' incentives to raise attention to the EU. Results show that in Spain, where there is no party conflict on European integration, government MPs pay attention to EU affairs following credit-claiming strategies. These strategies are likely in the context of EU events and when the perceived benefits of integration are high, and unlikely under critical junctures, when the EU cannot be framed as a governmental success. Opposition MPs pay less attention to EU affairs but they still use the EU to give visibility to issues that are of interest to their voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores to what extent the euro crisis brought about unprecedented attention to the European Union (EU) and if so with what consequences on the media visibility of different political actors in Spain. Drawing on a database of more than 27,000 stories published in the most read Spanish newspaper from 2004 to 2012, we demonstrate that following the outbreak of the crisis, executive elites receive more media coverage than social movements, trade unions, and challenger parties critical with EU policies and decisions. The media coverage of EU affairs, however, is not business as usual. Executive elites receive disproportionate media attention but they are no longer presented using the EU following credit-claiming strategies. Our results also indicate that the media are not passive actors that respond to institutional determinants but might be actively involved in the process of giving some actors more visibility in public debates on EU affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that external factors of EU coverage in the media need to be reassessed against domestic factors, in particular how parties modulate media attention to EU affairs. We explain which parties may set the EU on the media agenda, and how parties interact with events depending on the level of conflict over EU issues. Drawing on the first long-term analysis of partisan agenda-setting of EU affairs in the media – based on ARIMA time-series models of monthly data collected for six newspapers from 1990 to 2015 – we determine the scale of partisan agenda-setting and find partial support for our model. Political parties do not face the intrusion of EU issues, but some of them are actively involved in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single-party governments compared to those with multiple-party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government–opposition relations in Spain have been long characterised by a high level of consensus and cooperation. The question analysed here is whether the economic crisis initiated in 2008 has created unprecedented levels of conflict in the political system or whether opposition parties have maintained a cooperative strategy oriented to influence far-reaching policy decisions. Results illustrate that patterns of consensus have decreased significantly since the outbreak of the crisis, and this is partly explained by the rising amount of legislation with socio-economic content, variations in the government's popularity, and the type of government. The analysis also shows that the crisis has increased the incentives of opposition parliamentary groups to oppose European Union legislation, especially among left parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses media coverage of corruption scandals in Spain between 1996 and 2009. The fi rst aim is to determine to what extent the two most-read newspapers in Spain, El País and El Mundo, cover corruption scandals following different political orientations. Results illustrate highly partisan media coverage: there are important differences in how these newspapers cover corruption cases, depending on the political party involved (PP or PSOE). A second goal is to analyse whether the media influence citizens' perception of corruption as a public problem. Results show that, when the number of news stories on political corruption increases, the percentage of citizens that consider corruption as one of the most important problems in Spain also increases. Media impact on public opinion is high and occurs in the short- to mid-term. Finally, the paper analyses to what extent the perception of corruption is influenced by changes in the perception of the economic situation, by showing that this variable has low explanatory power compared to media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes comparative analysis of issue diversity of the executive agenda of several European countries and the United States over the postwar period. The results offer strong evidence of the limiting effect of core issues—the economy, government operations, defense, and international affairs—on agenda diversity. This suggests not only that some issues receive more attention than others but also that some issues are attended to only at times when the agenda is more diverse. When core functions of government are high on the agenda, executives pursue a less diverse agenda—focusing the majority of their attention on fewer issues. Some issues are more equal than others in executive agenda setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the beginning of each parliamentary session, almost all European governments give a speech in which they present the government’s policy priorities and legislative agenda for the year ahead. Despite the body of literature on governments in European parliamentary democracies, systematic research on these executive policy agendas is surprisingly limited. In this article the authors study the executive policy agendas—measured through the policy content of annual government speeches—over the past 50 years in three Western European countries: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Contrary to the expectations derived from the well-established “politics matters” approach, the analyses show that elections and change in partisan color have little effect on the executive issue agendas, except to a limited extent for the United Kingdom. In contrast, the authors demonstrate empirically how the policy agenda of governments responds to changes in public problems, and this affects how political parties define these problems as political issues. In other words, policy responsibility that follows from having government power seems much more important for governments’ issue agendas than the partisan and institutional characteristics of governments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses how well Spanish political elites have responded to the issues signalled as priorities preferred by Spanish citizens from the early 1990s to the present, and to what extent the degree of correspondence between citizens' and policymakers' priorities is related to elections, type of government, issue jurisdiction and institutional friction. To measure this the authors rely on Most Important Problem surveys and several databases on laws, bills, oral questions and annual speeches, coded according to the comparative agendas project. They argue that the prioritisation of issues by political elites better matches public preferences at the agenda-setting stage than at the decision-making stage, and that correspondence of public and policymakers' priorities is inversely related to institutional friction. The evidence also illustrates that policymakers are more responsive to public priorities on those issues without shared jurisdiction, when the executive governs without a majority and immediately after elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]