What have the parties agreed on over the past four years?

A study published by the Center for Liberal Studies (KEFIM) shows a gradual decline in opposition party consensus on government bills.

In particular, party agreement with parliamentary majority legislation dropped from double-digit percentages for all parties except KKE in 2019 (SYRIZA 22.2%, PASOK 55.6%, KKE 3.7%, Hellenic Solution 48.1%, MeRA25 11 ,1%). ), to 0% for all except PASOK (44%) and Hellenic Solution (4%) in 2023.

Observing a general trend towards consensus during the rule of Kyriakos Mitsotakis from July 2019 to April 2023, the party with the most agreements was PASOK-KINAL and the party with the fewest was KKE. The official opposition stands at 20% and is second in the rankings, followed by Velopoulos’ party with 14% and MeRA25 is fourth with 4%.

The study of the parliamentary behavior of opposition parties in terms of formulating the implemented policy, on the one hand, demonstrates the degree of consensus or gap within the party system, that is, the bodies of political representation of citizens in liberal democracies, on the other hand monitors the parties’ positions on specific policy proposals over time. In a broader sense, it determines the degree of programmatic and/or ideological convergence or divergence between opposition parties and the ruling majority.

Decreased Consensus

Government agreement during the first half of his tenure was particularly high, with PASOK agreeing to the majority of bills, while Hellenic Solution also gave its approval 48% of the time in 2019. SYRIZA, on the other hand, that space gave its consent with 22% of the vote. The only real constant is the KKE’s negative tendency to vote in parliament, as it was only in 2019 that it approved at least a bill, and in other years it did not agree even once. There has also been an increase in SYRIZA’s propensity to agree with the government in 2021, where it approached 30%.

Great agreements and disagreements

Large differences are observed in the analysis of consensus by policy area. According to the KEFIM analysis, the area with the highest degree of consensus is national defense and foreign policy, where both the main opposition party, SYRIZA, and the third most powerful party in parliament, PASOK, have an approval rating of over 70%, with SYRIZA at 72%, and PASOK almost universally agreeing with the government at a rate of 98%. On the other hand, it seems that the most controversial area is education, since in this case the three parties of the left did not agree on a single bill, while PASOK and Hellenic Solution also have a particularly low percentage of agreement. Out of the eight policy areas analyzed, PASOK is noted to have over 50% agreement in five of them.

Ideology factor

The KEFIM analysis also shows the legislative consensus of the last 19 years, from 2004 to 2023. The trend towards legislative consensus in government bills seems to be stronger for parties at the ideological center than for those ideologically inclined towards the extremes of the ideological scale.

As is usually noted, in the period 2004-2023. legislative consensus appears to have been linked to ideological stance. When the ideological position of the parties is closer to the center of the left-right scale, then they agree more, as it were, with the legislative work of the ruling majority.

What have the parties agreed on over the past four years?-1