Steffen Ganghof and Thomas Bräuninger, "Government Status and Legislative Behaviour: Partisan Veto Players in Australia, Denmark, Finland and Germany," Party Politics, 12 (July, 2006), 521-539.

First Paragraph:
Does the government status of legislative parties systematically affect their legislative behaviour? Are opposition parties less 'accommodating' than the parties that form the coalition government? Many country studies suggest this is indeed the case, at least with respect to popular policies. Opposition parties potentially supporting a government proposal may be reluctant to collaborate with the government because they find it difficult to claim credit for policy change (e.g. Huber, 1999). Thus, 'agreement may be thwarted by the pressure to compete . . .' (Scharpf, 1997: 192). Goodin states this conjecture very forcefully by contrasting parliamentary majority coalitions to USstyle divided government:

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1. Effect of positional utility on potential for policy change
Table 1. Government status and type of legislature
Figure 2a. Left-right placement of Danish parties on economic policy dimension
Figure 2b. Left-right placement of Finnish parties on economic policy dimension
Figure 3a. Left-right placement of German parties on economic policy dimension
Figure 3b. Left-right placement of Australian parties on economic policy dimension

First Paragraph of Conclusion:
In this article, we have explored the conjecture that formal responsibility and accountability for political change make a difference for parties' legislative behaviour and, hence, policy output. We performed two comparisons of policy-making in similar political systems, which differ, however, in the allocation of government status among the members of typical legislative coalitions. The case comparisons certainly do not provide decisive tests of the government status hypothesis. Yet they do support our argument: Finnish coalition parties' positional goals of becoming, or staying, part of the governing coalition tended to make them accommodating, while the positional incentives of opposition parties in Denmark contributed to policy deadlock, 'alternative majorities' and governments granting significant concessions to oppositional support parties. Similarly, experts of German bicameralism associate 'oppositional' Bundesrat majorities with non-accommodating behaviour, while neutral parties in the Australian Senate are generally fairly accommodating. In this final section, we discuss some implications of these findings for the approaches of Lijphart (1999b) and Tsebelis (2002).