Conclusions

The opposition parties in parliament may vote for or against the government’s legislative proposals, but can also propose their own legislation and/or focus on the government’s scrutiny. In doing this, they can respectively adopt a more or less consensual behaviour and decide to be particularly active or rather inactive. These strategic choices will be influenced by both their goals - votes, office, policy - and, we posited, several concomitant factors. This final chapter will reassess our main expectations in a detailed form: first, by presenting the comparative results about the opposition parties’ behaviour on the basis of the country chapters’ findings; then, by briefly addressing which general observations about parliamentary opposition can be formulated; finally, by identifying the overall patterns of conflict or consensus and how partisan and country features interact in this regard.