The conventional view of parties in parliamentary systems is that parties perform different functions depending on their majority status. Whereas governing parties perform legislative and elective functions, the control of the executive falls to the opposition. We argue that the distinction between the parliamentary activities of government and opposition becomes blurred in multilevel politics. As parties join governments at various levels, they tend to develop a governing ethos, which results in a less confrontational and more issue-centered style of executive control – even when parties are nominally in opposition. To study the proposed effect of parties’ systemic integration on their parliamentary behavior, we analyze parliamentary questions in 30 German city councils. The data enable a strong comparative research design, as local parties operate in different political contexts, suggesting different behaviors under the conventional model. To quantify the substance of the parliamentary questions, we use supervised text classification to label approximately 22.000 parliamentary questions that were submitted in the 30 city councils over the course of one legislative period. The results indicate that more systemically integrated parties are more likely to ask issue-centered and conciliatory parliamentary questions even when they are in opposition, whereas parties further from majority status exhibit a more confrontational style that is aimed at embarrassing the executive.