Parliamentary opposition: Concept and functions

Abstract

According to the political sciences comparative literature, political opposition is a crucial component of democracy. Nonetheless, comparative analysis is detrimental to parliamentary oppositions in favor of governability. Because of that, we do not have a research tradition regarding parliamentary oppositions, and therefore lack a conceptual definition to clarify systematic comparative analysis on this matter. We intend to contribute in filling this theoretical and methodological gap. For that, we first propose a more specific conceptual definition of parliamentary opposition, and afterwards determine its six main functions that interfere in the process of government. We have thus found a need to comprehensively study parliamentary opposition in the literature.