Best Practices to Strengthen the Opposition
~ A research project by Governance Innovation Labs
1. Chronological Listing: A comprehensive A-Z list of issues or allegations against the government. This should be regularly updated and maintained.
- UPENN, has a comprehensive chronological list of major public apologies and issues related to it.
- ProPublica, maintains comprehensive and updated databases of various government issues and misconduct in the United States. Their ‘Trump Town’ project tracked appointees and their conflicts of interest in the Trump administration.
- Human Rights Watch regularly updates its reports on human rights issues in various countries, providing detailed chronological information.
Various online media platforms like The Wire, The Guardian, and HowStuffWorks have come up with lists of allegations against the government. But there is no organized online platform with a comprehensive list listing everything with date and effect.
2. Weighted Listing: The issues of the government are ranked according to the importance of weightage given based on the impact of the policy, response of the government and steps taken to counter it in future.
- Transparency International, publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index, which ranks countries by their perceived levels of corruption using a weighted system.
- The World Bank uses a weighted system to assess and rank the different countries, considering multiple factors using World Development Indicators.
- Freedom House, publishes annual reports on global freedom, including detailed country reports that are weighed based on political rights and civil liberties
3. Compartmentalized Opposition: The opposition should curate a list of allegations based on each sector. (which is in both chronological and weighted list)
- The UK Labour Party maintains detailed reports on various sectors like the NHS (National Health Services), education, and housing, highlighting issues and allegations against the ruling Conservative Party.
- The Indian National Congress (INC) maintains sector-specific reports and allegations against the ruling government, though there is room for more systematic chronological and weighted listing
- Similarly, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is known for highlighting specific issues in sectors such as education and healthcare in Delhi
4. Technocratic Opposition: Employing subject matter experts as a form of parallel government in fields of economics, healthcare, education, and infrastructure to analyze government schemes.
- The former government of the Soviet Union has often been referred to as a technocracy. Many leaders like Leonid Brezhnev, often had a technical background. In 1986, 89% of Politburo members were engineers.
- Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party is often cited as an example of a technocracy, as it has appointed many leaders with technical knowledge and expertise.
- Singapore is also considered having a technocratic style of governance.
5. Shadow Cabinet by Opposition: The Shadow Cabinet consists of shadow ministers who generally take roles that mirror and scrutinize the current government, and develop policies for the party
- In the UK, the shadow front bench decides if amendments are required to a legislation brought in by the treasury benches. Currently, Leader of the Labour Party Keir Starmer is leading the ‘shadow front bench’. The Labour Party is the main Opposition party in the UK House of Commons. Similar concepts exist in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand and South Africa, among others, in some form.
- In India, there have been experiments with the running of shadow cabinets. However, these have happened only at the state level.
- In 2005, a shadow cabinet was formed by the opposition BJP in Maharashtra to counter the then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh-led Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government.
- The Congress had also formed a shadow cabinet in Madhya Pradesh in 2014 to counter the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led government.
- In 2015, a shadow cabinet was formed in the coastal state of Goa. However, it was not formed by the opposition, but by a NGO called Gen Next.
- The most recent example came from Kerala where a shadow cabinet was formed in April 2018 by social activists, and not members of the Opposition, to analyze policies of the Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government.
- In the Lok Sabha Elections of 2024, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) secured a combined vote share of 42.5%. The combined vote share of the INDIA alliance was close behind, at 40.6%, just 2% lower than that of the NDA. While India might not have an official shadow government at a national level, this election results could pave the way for assembling an official shadow cabinet, with designated shadow ministers.
REFERENCES
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/shadow-cabinet
https://www.newsreel.asia/articles/the-case-for-an-unofficial-shadow-government-in-india
