The COVID-19 pandemic presents an exceptional crisis situation not only for governments, but also for politicians in opposition. This article analyses opposition party expressed sentiment visa -vis government actions and policies during the first six months of 2020. Based on an original content analysis of parliamentary debates in four established parliamentary democracies (Germany, Israel, Netherlands, United Kingdom), relatively positive opposition expressed sentiment in parliament early on during the crisis is observed, in line with a 'rally effect' observed in public opinion. Sentiment turned more negative as the first wave of the crisis abated. Larger opposition parties with considerable prior government experience were more positive than larger parties without such experience.

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This article explains the variation in opposition behavior by investigating parliamentary voting of opposition parties across 16 European national parliaments. It finds that features of an opposition party that increase its likelihood of winning office in future elections—its size and experience in government—increase the party’s tendency toward confrontation with the government, as do features that increase the party’s need to differentiate itself from the government. At the systemic level, features that increase the attractiveness of cooperation—such as an open structure of competition and considerable influence of the opposition on parliamentary decision-making—decrease tendencies toward confrontation. Together, party-specific and systemic features explain two-thirds of the observed variation in the behavior of opposition parties, even without controlling for vote-specific factors.

Patterns of legislative activity in parliamentary regimes have long been defined by political parties and the division between government and opposition. However, several trends in recent years may challenge this distinction by mitigating the electoral connection between parliamentary behavior and electoral competition. Issue multidimensionality, party system fragmentation, and political behavioral personalization, while common to most established democracies, have been extremely pronounced in Israel. Analyzing all legislation votes taken in the Knesset between 2003 and 2014, this article uses the Israeli case to demonstrate how a fragmented opposition and the prevalence of highly personalized, nonpartisan private-member legislation, result in deviation from the familiar government–opposition divide and diminish opposition parties’ vote-seeking behavior in parliamentary votes. As an extreme case of trends that are gaining ground in most established democracies, this case study contributes to the understanding of the effects of general changes to the political system on legislative behavior.