Does Informative Opposition Influence Electoral Accountability?

In majoritarian legislatures, minority parties cannot directly influence policymaking. However, they may serve as whistleblowers against the majority parties’ harmful policymaking. This study aims to explore whether a minority party’s monitoring mitigates a political agency problem in a majoritarian legislature. For this purpose, we construct a two-period election model in which voters face information asymmetries regarding each party’s type and the state of the world. After the majority party proposes a bill, the minority party votes for or against the proposed bill, which is a cheap-talk message. We show that the role of monitoring by the minority party is limited, even if we allow the possibility that the party is the truth-telling type. Under a weak condition, its opposition is informative, but does not change the electorate’s voting behaviors. Consequently, any equilibrium outcomes attained in the game with monitoring are attainable in the game without monitoring. This implies that monitoring by the minority party does not influence electoral accountability. This irrelevance of monitoring is resolved when the minority party can delay legislation through obstruction.