GOVERNMENT – OPPOSITION Political Institutions GOVERNMENT – OPPOSITION Q-Dem is aimed to develop research and data about the functioning of political institutions in Spain. In doing so, we are aimed to respond to different questions regarding how and why policy makers prioritize issues across time, these means to analyze questions like: To what extent does the division of labor across parliamentary committees affect MPs productivity, how many oral questions are introduced by MPs across the term? Which interest groups are invited to give evidence in parliamentary committees? Political Elites GOVERNMENT – OPPOSITION Most agenda setting research takes into consideration as explanatory variables political preferences, variations in the socio-economic context and the institutional framework in which political actors and leaders behave, along with other social organizations. Recent analysis, however, emphasize the need to introduce consideration of individual socio-economic characteristics of political actors as a new explanatory variable in order to understand variations in agenda dynamics. To work in this direction, Q-Dem is elaborating analysis and collecting data in order to explore the impact of this new variable in the quality of democracy. Parliamentary Behavior GOVERNMENT – OPPOSITION The opposition plays a crucial role in modern representative democracies. Our goal is to explore parties’ parliamentary behavior and more specifically the conditions under which consensus or conflict is likely to predominate in parliamentary relations. In order to do so, we consider as explanatory variables the impact of institutional factors, such as the type of government; political factors, like parties’ ideological distance with the incumbent; and contextual factors, like changing economic circumstances. We also take into consideration the type of party, exploring to what extent the parliamentary behavior of new opposition parties differs from that of mainstream parties. The analysis relies on an extensive database on parties’ voting on legislation. The database provides information about whether parties support, reject or abstain in the voting of all organic laws and decree laws passed in the Spanish Parliament from 1996 to present. Publications Datasets Other lines of research Agendas and Political Representation Interest Groups and Quality of Democracy Transparency Europeanization Social Media