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1. Introduction
Much of the study of multiparty parliamentary democracies is focused on understanding
coalition ‘games.’ The winner(s) of these games enter government, and the losers sit in the
opposition. However, in politics, as in games with young children, the losers don’t necessarily
quietly accept their fate – sometimes they get upset and start throwing things, sometimes they
claim the winners cheated and demand a do-over, and sometimes they immediately begin
devising ways of doing better the next time they play. In general, we should expect losers should
take steps to improve their position in political games.
William Riker coined the term ‘heresthetics’ to refer to the art of political manipulation –
the methods by which actors turn defeat into victory (Riker 1986, 1993). While his work was
received warmly it has not been incorporated much by other political scientists, although recently
more work has begun to explicitly use Riker’s conceptualization (McLean 2001, 2002; Epstein
and Shvetsova, 2002). The purpose of this paper is to carefully consider and model potential
strategies that opposition parties have in coalition systems in parliamentary democracies.
In this paper I examine opposition strategies in a policy space based on models of a three-
party parliament. I examine opposition strategies for choosing positions and introducing new
issues under various assumptions about the costs of changing policy positions and introducing
new issues, and the payoff to being in government. I model three types of coalitional systems:
pivotal systems, alternational systems, and unconstrained systems, both for the unidimensional
Downsian case and a multidimensional Rikerian case in which parties may introduce new issues.
The principal predictions of these models are that parties that (1) value office highly,
relative to their competitors, (2) can change positions on issues more freely than their
competitors, and (3) can take advantage of issue dimensions which disadvantage their opponents,
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